


Tiger in the House

by strange_glow



Series: Virus [7]
Category: Weiss B Side, Weiss Kreuz
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-06-04 11:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 32,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6656626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strange_glow/pseuds/strange_glow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kudoh Yohji (Sarazawa Yuuji) and Fujimiya Aya go undercover in Krypton Brand to find out for Esset who has the capability to create 'talents'.<br/>There will be politically related violence and things going boom, so if you are easily traumatized do not read.  However there will be no chalk.  Maybe.<br/>Part 7 of the Virus series, where Kudoh Yohji turns out to have been an amnesiatic, brain washed Sarazawa Yuuji of Esset.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Chapter One

  
“We were close enough, there was no where else we could have landed,” Schuldig kept his protesting voice to a quiet hiss. Brad had shut him out mentally, which was probably a good thing, given the myriad ways he could think of to torture his telepathic business partner and lover.  
The medics rolled the guy on the gurney past them as Brad found the rental car counter and slapped down his ID.  
The man on the gurney shook his head from side to side violently until the oxygen mask dislodged. “It was on the wing!” he yelled. “I saw it! I tell you I saw it! Monkey thing—horrible—horrible…!”  
One of the medics put the mask back on and another one hit him with another half dose of sedative.  
Brad gave Schuldig a scathing look.  
Schuldig reached the point of unrepentance he usually did when knowing there was no forgiveness. “No sex for _you_ tonight,” he stated before he could be punished.  
“Oooh, sweet,” Yuuji said, checking out the model of vehicle Brad had rented. “Range Rover Vogue; those things are like rolling luxury hotels.” He smiled beguilingly at the plump young woman who had come back with the keys so that dazzled, she was about to put them in his held out hand.  
Brad snatched them before they touched his palm. “In your dreams,” he said and turned to walk away.  
Aya punched Yuuji in the arm, glaring at him, then pulled his own suitcase off after Schuldig and Brad.  
“Loooser,” Nagi said, as he and Tot rolled their cases past him.  
Yuuji rolled his eyes and grabbed the handle of his own case. What ever happened to when people used to carry their own cases or call for a cart, he thought. The place was full of the low rumble of plastic wheels and metal castors. He wondered idly how many of them were full of explosives.  
There was a shout and security advanced from all corners. He blinked then took longer strides to catch up with the others.  
“Well, there’s my good deed for the day,” Schuldig said. “Now back to being evil.”  
“Was it really?” Yuuji asked.  
“Do I lie?” Schuldig glanced at him. “The last thing we need is a terrorist bomb going off at the airport we just arrived at, yes?”  
“I wonder what he was using?” Yuuji looked back, professional curiosity peaked.  
“Oh, stop,” Brad said, (still irritated and probably would be for the rest of the mission) putting the key in the lock and pressing in the code of the rental, hitting the boot button so that the back would open. Everyone started stuffing their suitcases in.  
“We don’t have to go to the hotel like right now,” the blond japanese protested. “He’s running,” he stood on his toes to crane his neck over the crowd.  
“No,” Brad said flatly. “I swear I will shoot you myself if you do.”  
Yuuji deflated like a little kid told he wasn’t going to the amusement park.  
Aya punched him again, then put his case in the SUVs cargo area.  
“Stop that,” Yuuji told him as mildly as possible. “I’m getting a permanent bruise. Probably long term nerve damage.” He rubbed his aching arm muscle. It wasn’t his fault the stewardess had flirted with him and managed to fall in his lap during turbulence.  
Aya glared at him again and moved past him to sit in the furthest back seat.  
Schuldig shoved him aside and got in the front passenger seat. Nagi made sure he and Tot got the second row by sheer brute force. That left Yuuji the seat next to Aya. He sighed a little and got in. Aya bunched up as far away from him as possible, given the amount of room.  
Brad started the SUV just as the video game sounds started in the back seat. “Headphones!” he ordered.  
With matching sighs and digging out of earbuds, Tot and Nagi did as they were told.  
“Welcome to the casbah,” Schuldig commented dryly moments later as they entered the main traffic road and began passing the day to day foot traffic and shop signs.  
“Get used to it,” Crawford stated.  
“Oh, let the head fuckery begin,” the German stated.  
“And the flash back nightmares,” Yuuji complained.


	2. One

The little shop wasn’t so bad.  The streets in this area were convoluted, and the windows, despite being bowed out, were smaller and more crowded, but the foot traffic was good.  Ken’s initial unease at being shipped out to Krypton Brand in London was wearing off.  He hadn’t liked it, but avoiding the political shit storm vrs being honest and in prison (and admittedly, a push from Omi-kun) had made the choice for him.  Ending up in another flower shop as cover just seemed right.  If there was any continuity in his life, it might as well be flowers to balance the blood.  At least they smelled better, and his much neglected high school English was improving.

But the feeling here was different. Like the glass would break under foot any minute.  Yuki, Michael and Kurumi-chan were much more fragile than Omi and maybe even Sena, though he had not had the chance to get to know the kid better.  Free was okay, just—weird. 

Chloe was something else.  In a way the man reminded him more of that damned red headed oni from Schwarz than one of the good guys.  You never knew what was going on inside his head, in that inscrutable European way.  It was like they all wore a mask of open friendliness to hide what was really going on inside. 

‘Sort of like Yohji, too,’ Ken was suddenly struck with the thought. 

Mihirogi-san had shown them the photos of Aya and Yohji, there was no mistaking who they were.  But why were they with those creeps from Schwarz? And why had Yohji been acting so strange before they had disappeared?   

He’d been using bombs. 

Since when had Yohji had any knowledge of explosives, or an inclination to use them?  And then Aya and he had taken off, and Omi’s Grandfather’s place had been bombed, pretty much destroying the last of any family Omi had had, but yeah, there was something to the whole Takatori and Aya thing very suspiciously there. 

He frowned.  Yohji had turned into a different person somehow.  It couldn’t have all been about turning gay and seducing Aya.  And maybe it was Aya’s fault for being so—pretty for a guy.  He frowned.

But the whole Schwarz thing sort of made sense.... 

He shook his head.  No.  None of it made any sense. 

*     *     *

Aya had never been on the intel side of Kritiker’s operations. Omi had been the computer geek, _his_ job had been to kill. 

Crawford had Naoe, Schuldig, and Yuuji working on the data gathering immediately after they had checked into the hotel suite.  A table was set up and laptops were out on it before the coffee had been brewed.

It was just a bit frightening, the way they could pull up stuff from thin air.

Crawford’s ability to see the future gave them the outcome of a search seconds into it, allowing them to discard time wasting dead ends. The information Schuldig had pulled from the enemy agent’s mind was being expanded with a ruthless tracking, as things he had glimpsed were connected with understanding.  Naoe’ ability to pick up and correlate both their input allowed him to race along search lines of pursuit as fast as his telekinetic mind could type.  Yuuji’s bank of experience and knowledge from the field allowed them to move through maps like natives and form access to weaponry.  Kritiker had never moved so fast and certainly not in the field, despite the police connection and access to the Interpol data bank.   

Aya glanced at Tot, who had settled herself on a pushed aside sofa with her tablet.  He and she were the oddballs here.  But given experience, he had no doubt their parts to play would come.  He consoled himself for being out of the loop with making the coffee, and checking the modest sheaf of menus the hotel left laid out on the little key table just inside the door.    

It wasn’t anything like Weiss, or even Crasher.  No long hours of boredom, too much down time to think about things and let things brew into resentment and depression.  Esset’s people hit the ground running; for them it was habit to be always in play.  Aya had to remind himself, also, that he no longer had to worry about his sister.  No more sitting there feeling utterly helpless, going over what he should have done that awful day, where he had gone wrong.  She was safe, her life restored.  He had to remind himself so many times a day, that the terrible weight on his shoulders was gone.

And there was Yohji—Yuuji.  He was happy now, and the more active, the more involved he was, the happier he was.  The years had dropped off him, so that he was no longer, ‘the old man’ of the group. No longer the drunken disgusting fool he had thought…well, never mind that thought, he pushed it aside.

Yuuji, soft, sweet, sexy one moment; hard as nails the next.  Always infuriating.  Aya watched him, unaccustomed to seeing him tied to a laptop; watched him frowning slightly, interested, excited, amused, the expressions passed over his handsome face.  Sipping his tea and watching Yuuji was certainly more entertaining than dealing with flower arranging. 

“Funny you should mention that, Fujimiya,” Schuldig said aloud, looking at him across the room.  “Come and look.”

Aya was irked that his thoughts had been over heard, but something in the German’s tone hinted at a true coincidence. 

“Stop fussing, I was looking here just as you thought it, and it stood out in the crowd. I told you a dozen times, I can not help picking up your shallow surface thoughts.  Now look,” he turned the laptop a quarter for Aya to view. 

There on the screen was a page in a directory.

_Kitten in the House: flowers, arrangements, interior horticulture and landscaping._

Aya frowned.

“Yeah, creepy much?” Yuuji said. 

“Lease holder on the building, a fronting corporation leading back to one Lord Richard Krypton,” Crawford said, his tone light with intrigue. 

Yuuji looked up again from his screen. “Krypton Brand’s connection with Kritiker.  That’s rather blatant, isn’t it?”

“They take hide in plain sight far too seriously,” Crawford smiled ruefully.  “We have a spy who was very near talent level with an implant in his brain to increase his range, and a vague connection to Krypton Brand, whose current main goal is to locate and destroy the makers of something called Human Interleukin, a drug that purports to create super humans— _if_ it doesn’t kill them.  Gentlemen, I believe we have a mutual enemy.” 

“Set up,” Yuuji said in a way that suggested he was speaking of a standard procedure; Aya was clueing into the gestalt of these Esset trained men.       

“Oh, yes,” Crawford agreed with a wry grin and focused on Aya.  “Flee for your life, Fujimiya,” he said calmly.  “Schuldig, go after him.  But do try not to kill him.  I don’t want you breaking a leg or getting run over by a car.  And Fujimiya, bloody it up a bit.  You want to look the part.” 

“ _Now_?” Aya asked, a bit shocked, his tea mug still half full. He’d just ordered take out food.   

“Yes, now,” Crawford said.  “The stress will help your cover.  Scrape it up, bang it up, and run,” he looked at his watch. “You have a 15 minute start.  You can convince Hidaka to help you rescue ‘ _Kudoh_ ’ later.” 

“But why…” Aya started to demand.

“Oh, _come on_!” Yuuji interrupting him, looking at Crawford in protest.  “I don’t _want_ to be rescued. You’re not sending me back into that floral hell hole,” he held up his hand and snapped his fingers at Crawford. “Come on, think of another plan.  This one is not working,” he slouched back in his chair and crossed his arms, the picture of stubborn refusal. 

Crawford just grinned evilly at Sarazawa.  “Clock’s ticking, Fujimiya.” He told him the place he had to be in 20 minute’s time if he wanted to be found by Hidaka.    

*     *     *

That bastard German had used his mind control to sic a random gang of Pakistani thugs on Aya, who was most definitely asking for it, being an oddly red headed and very pretty looking foreigner.  Aya vowed to wring the son of a bitch’s neck the first chance he got.  Just enough to make him regret it, not enough to remove the block between Yuuji and that snake of an ex. 

/Stumble, Lucky, stumble, the fall will do you good,/ Schuldig’s voice taunted in his head.

He gritted his teeth and fell, rolling just enough to avoid hitting his head.  He took it hard on his shoulder in the dirty alleyway, wincing from the pain.  /Fuck you, asshole!/ he thought back.

The Paki gangsters caught up with him, yanking him to his feet, tearing the jacket he was wearing in the process.  It was damned hard not to respond.  He got a punch in the guts for starters, then one to his face, not much caring to pay attention to the crap they were spewing at him verbally.  He put all his ‘fight back’ into thinking horrible things at that jerk German.

/Now, you look the part,/ Schuldig thought at him, amusement coming through with the words, a creepy unwanted warm feeling, like a caress from a dirty old man, making Aya shudder. 

Suddenly his attackers stopped, frozen in their tracks like mannequins, one in mid haul back to punch him again. 

“Aya!?” an annoyingly familiar voice called from around the corner to the alley he had run into.

/Fall down, stupid!/ Schuldig ordered.  

The thugs busted into a run like the devil was after them, down the other end of the alley.  Aya half hesitated, then fell, laying still, eyes closed.  His cheek and eye were already swelling, damn it. /I’m going to kill you./   

A body hit the ground beside him, Ken kneeling to check on him.  “Aya, what the hell?” he exclaimed.  “It _is_ you.  What are you doing in London?  Why were those guys after you?”

/Nighty-night,/ was the last thing he thought, courtesy of the telepath, before falling unconscious. 

*     *     *

Schuldig came swaggering in just in time to snag a plastic fork and steal some of Crawford’s couscous salad.  “Ooh, that’s good.”  He flipped open one of the styrofoam boxes and grabbed a paper plate.  “Too bad skinny boy isn’t here to have any.  I will just have to take his.”

“Tough luck, we already divvied it up,” Yuuji said around a half chewed cheek full of tandori chicken.   “He better not be too messed up.”

“Nah, just a black eye and a sore tummy.  You can kiss and make it all better later,” he sat down and grinned at Crawford just to do so.  “Though those guys I used for the scam are going to be sorry when the cops knock on their doors.  CCTV cameras everywhere.  My kind of country.” He stuffed a forkful of chicken into his mouth. 

“Behave yourself,” Brad warned, giving him a look.

“I am an angel,” Schuldig looked at Tot who was eating daintily, as if the food was about to bite her back, but eating all the same.  He raised eyebrows at Yuuji. 

Yuuji shook his head.  “Not me.”

Nagi responded to the querying look with a shrug and continued eating his meal with chopsticks.  He kept a pocket case that was like a miniature pool cue set in the way the black and red lacquered pieces screwed together, the little geek.  The couscous was defiant, but then, what _was_ the use of being telekinetic?

“Well, it’s a start,” Schuldig opined and changed the topic yet again.  “Lets just hope your little playmate comes up with a good one to tell those Krypton Brand agents,” he told Yuuji.  “Not all of them are as amateur as Kritiker.  Things get far more complicated here than in Japan where the crime is sophisticated, but simple in motive.  Criminals here do not fall on their knees to confess and apologize when caught.”

“That’s simplistic in itself,” Yuuji accused. 

“Well, look at it this way.  Over here, it is layers of complication.  Someone owes someone, someone is greedy, someone has issues, someone does not want to be thought of badly by family or group members, someone has no other way of thinking but the scam, the con, no other way of life is possible—all this at once in many cases.  In Japan, not so much, because the socialization is different.  It is the group, not the self.  The moment a Japanese person steps out of the group even a little, out breaks the sweat.  Mistakes are made.  A Japanese criminal has to become one cold hearted bastard to be successful and then the stakes are much higher and the crime much more alarming.  A Japanese criminal starts out with the morbidly depressing knowledge that sooner or later, he will get caught and is resigned to it.  European criminals think they are too smart and will never get caught.”

“You’ve made a study of this?” Yuuji said archly.

“I get bored on the plane,” Schuldig said, and downed half a bottle of beer. 

*     *     *

Aya came to on a narrow bed.  He scowled and made sure everything moved, then put a hand to his eye. 

Ken came back into the little bedroom with an ice pack.  “Hey, are you okay?” he asked.

“What are you doing here?” Aya asked. 

Ken blinked.  “Yeah, about that.  Kritiker got me out of the country. What the heck are you doing here?  Did you know there are photos of you and Yohji with those creeps from Esset?  What the hell is going on?” he tried to lay the ice pack on Aya’s eye.

Aya snatched it away from him and put it on himself, laying back to hold it there with a shaky breath.  The cool was soothing.  The punch to his face had been a glancing blow, more color than injury, thank what ever it was that kept him safe.  He had to think fast, damn it.  Damn Esset and all their elite training, and damn Crawford for making a fool of him _again_!  “That damned German telepath,” he growled with feeling.  “Yohji and I went to look for my sister.  I don’t remember much after that, it’s all a blur.  There was a bomb scare at the airport and there I was.  He lost control of me or something.  I ran for it.  Then those fucking creeps started harassing me.”

“I saw the airport thing on the news earlier,” Ken said.  “Weird how they brought you here.  You don’t know anything?”

Aya took a chance.  “Something about Human Interaction or something, some drug, I don’t know.” And that was basically the truth, he didn’t know.  He shifted the ice pack.  It was getting soft rather fast.  “What is this?”

“Frozen peas,” Ken grinned. 

Aya handed them back. “Cook them with rice. I’m starved.”  That would get rid of Ken for a while.  He needed time to come up with a plausible story for the ones higher up.


	3. Chapter Two

Chapter Two

“You know I’m not happy with this whole thing,” Yuuji informed Brad.  He’d been sulking on the love seat in their larger suite for over an hour now, and the fidgeting was getting insane.  Kudoh was trying to break through again.  The desire to get drunk and smoke a pack or two or three was like an alien parasite gnawing on every nerve in his body. 

“Unhappy or not, we need more information, and Fujimiya is in a unique position to obtain it,” Brad had gotten a shower and was trying to wind down for the day.  The other three were watching some Frankenstein rehash with the badly aging child star from the Harry Potter movies as Igor.  Victor Frankenstein was portrayed as a happy go lucky asshole with delusions of grandeur, and possibly, no sense of smell.  “I see the gross out factor strikes again,” he commented and sat down beside Yuuji to ignore it.  “Tell me something.  Have you been using Fujimiya as an emotional band aid?”

“Maybe,” Yuuji frowned, scowling at the TV.  “I point out that I was fine until you tossed him right back into that mess.”

Brad turned sideways on the love seat, putting his elbow on the back of it to support his head with his hand, getting comfortable.  He looked Yuuji over and smiled slightly, tired. “Talk to me.  Tell me why.”

Yuuji blinked, looking perplexed.  “Brain washing,” he said after a few moments.  “He’s replaced the brain washing somehow. I feel responsible for him.”

“You’re in love,” Brad said, a slight hint of sadness there in his amused eyes.  He reached over to toy with a blond strand, and teased,  “You can’t breath, you can’t think, you can’t function with out him in reach.” He tugged the lock before letting it go.

“I will kill you,” Yuuji stated.

Brad chuckled softly, then ran his fingers through his own damp hair to loosen up the strands to dry quicker, looking over at Schuldig.  Then he focused on Yuuji again.  “I suppose it’s putting him right back where you took him from that’s upset you.”

“What if he doesn’t want to come back?” Yuuji said, tracing the design in the loveseat’s arm fabric. 

“Are you doubting your talent?” Brad reached over to lay a hand on his thigh.  “He’ll come back,” he assured him.  “Now pull your god damned shit together, Sarazawa Yuuji.  I need you to help me plan how to get you out of my evil clutches.  Because I can tell you right now, that nut job of yours has no clue how to go about this.”

“Which is why you sent him and not me,” Yuuji looked at him with a suspicious arch of an eyebrow.  “He’s too damned innocent to be suspected.”

“Where as _you_ \--are suspicious as hell,” he drew back his hand.  “Why don’t you get some sleep?  Tomorrow is going to be interesting.”

“Is this a warning, or just good advice?”

“That would be telling,” Brad smiled again. 

Yuuji leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.  “Bastard.” He got up on his feet and sighed.  “If I have nightmares, can I come crawl in with you?”

“Fuck off and die,” Brad said kindly.

“Love you too, Sweetheart,” Yuuji made a pretend pistol at him and faked shooting him.  It was going to be a long night.

      *     *     *

Aya hated this.  Every one looking at him, judging him.  Was the hair dyed? Why the crazy contacts?  Too skinny, too gangly, too girly, too—everything.  He missed his bulky orange sweater, at least that covered up his spindly body.  His hands he could keep in his pockets.  Ruined knuckles on long, spidery fingers, calluses, scars.  He hated this. 

The woman with the fancy clothes and piled hair looked at him the most carefully.  “You escaped Esset’s most elite team?”

Aya hunched his shoulders and dug his hand deeper in to his pockets, having the usual annoying effect of pulling the waist band of his jeans down to his clavicles.  “Maybe they aren’t so elite,” he said quietly. 

Mihirogi Nana continued to merely regard him. 

“Aya-kun is Weiss,” Ken insisted.  “Schwarz had it out for all of us after we busted up Takatori Reiji and his rotten brothers, and we’d beaten them before. Aya is one of _us._ Call Persia, ask him!”

“And Kudoh?” the woman asked calmly.

Ken hesitated just a bit, then spoke again.  “He’s one of us, too.  What ever they did to him, something happened to him. He went missing for a week, then came back—changed.” He looked at Aya for confirmation.

“He changed,” Aya said honestly.  “I know they did something to him.”

“He’d been compromised, you mean,” Mihirogi said.

“Does it matter?” Aya asked gruffly, lifting his chin a little and shaking his bangs out of his eyes.  “Do we save people—or just kill them?” he glared at her.

She blinked, then glanced at a japanese girl in her late teens or so with bleached hair in a short bob.  She drew an inward sigh, then reluctantly looked at the others. 

The oddly dressed, oddly tall, thin, fair haired man with facial tattoos held up a card.  It was a tarot card, the hanged man.  “We save him,” he spoke in a whisper.  “Then we decide.”

Aya decided this would do and nodded once, though he wondered about the sanity factor here.  After dealing with a paranormal talents, a kami, and Shinjuku, there was not much left in the world he could call BS on.  If the guy wanted to use Tarot cards, who cared?

Ken introduced everyone with his usual annoying ‘lets all be a team and get out there and win’ attitude.  Aya wondered if he had already rounded up the neighborhood kids for soccer practice. 

“They took your katana?” Ken was asking him.

Well he didn’t have it on him, now did he?  Kinda hard to hide a meter plus katana in a short jacket, jeans and a T. “Yes,” he said.  He had to watch his attitude until he knew the dynamics here.  He remembered what Yuuji had said, about his ability to just fit in.  He envied him.  Here he was, despite Ken knowing him, and almost everyone but the three Europeans speaking Japanese, he still felt like he was from some other dimension, not quite a fit on this planet. 

Then it occurred to him; he’d not felt out of place with Schwarz.  Awkward, put upon, teased, but not out of place.  His worst enemies had treated him fairly well, cured his sister, and key factor, had not threatened him with death if he _didn’t_ work for them.  Who the hell were the bad guys here?

“If you betray us, little stray cat,” Mihirogi-san said, “You will be put down.”

_And there it was, right on cue,_ he thought morbidly. 

Ken punched him in the shoulder.  “Come on, I’ll show you around.  It’s not much different from Tokyo, but the customers all speak English, so you’re off the phone for a while.”

Aya wanted to sock him in the face, but again, he had to keep neutral until he was sure of his place in the group.   That miserable German had put him in Hell and knew it.  “What about Kudoh?”

“That will be decided by those higher up,” Mihirogi-san said, her tone still aloof.  “We need to find out where they have gone to ground and what efforts might be made to retrieve you.  Do you remember doing anything for them?  Ken mentioned your sister?” 

Aya shook his head, noticing that she had been in England so long that she neglected the proper address of people.  “I have—vague memories of moving here and there.  Being on the plane, or in a car.  I don’t know what happened to my sister.  When I got the call she had gone missing in the move from one hospital to the next, Yohji came with me to look for her.  That’s the last clear memory I have until the disturbance at the airport.” He rubbed his arm where Ken had hit it, thinking of how Yuuji— _Yohji_ (he had to remember not to slip up) had complained earlier.

Ken looked dismayed.  “Man, I’m sorry.  Your sister—I’m sorry,” he said. 

Aya nodded again.  It seemed to be the best way to deal with things. 

“The Esset agents never mentioned your sister?” Mihirogi asked, not about to let it go that easily. 

“I don’t remember,” Aya said. 

“I think it would be best to set you up with a hypnotist specialist,” she stated.  “It’s possible you over heard plans that might lead us to them and your missing team mate.  I will be in touch,” she said and turned to leave. 

Aya noted that the fair haired man saw her out, speaking quietly with her in English. 

“Aya-kun,” Ken said.  “I know we didn’t get along too well back home, but I want you to know, I’m still on your side.”

“Still Weiss,” Aya said.

Ken grinned.  “Yeah, still Weiss.”

In the little kitchen in the back, Aya was stopped short by Ken’s turning to look at him seriously.  “About Yohji-kun, he was acting strange alright, and I don’t just mean the whole—“ he struggled with the words.  “You know—thing, I mean the bombs and stuff.  Where did he get that from?  That wasn’t brain washing, you don’t get all that from brain washing.  Brain washing is just convincing someone something is true or not, not—sleep learning them things or something.  And that watch with the wires, Omi didn’t even know where that came from.  That’s not something you just buy off the internet.  It’s pretty sophisticated technology.”

“Ken,” Aya said bluntly.  “Yohji was in Weiss before I was.  You’ve known him longer than me.”

Ken frowned at him seriously.  “Maybe neither one of us knows him as well as we thought.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m going to let him just disappear like my sister did,” Aya stated. 

Ken shook his head.  “Your right, we have to give him a chance, no matter what KB says.”

   *     *     *

“Fujimiya is in good,” Schuldig reported, storming back into the hotel suite and all but slamming the door.  “What ever you do, forget going for a nice morning jog in this town!  Some girl just got mauled by a pack of stupid fucks in the park.  What the hell is wrong with these people anyway?  When did this country become such a fucking trash heap?”

“Did you do anything?” Nagi asked, somewhat alarmed.

“Was I supposed to stand there and watch?” the red head threw a hand out.  “I dragged a cop car into it.  Fucking _broad daylight_!  People just looked the other way.  My job is to spy on the pansy patch, not play fucking Captain America.  The cops did not even want to come, I made good and sure they were pissed off about being hauled into it, too.  Those assholes got more than they gave.”

“Language,” Brad reminded him. 

Schuldig shook his head, wringing his right hand with his left and pacing.  “I want to punch something.”

“And break your hand again,” Brad warned.  “Bang your head on the wall instead and knock some sense into yourself.”

“Oh, funny,” Schuldig shot at him. 

“I’m serious,” Brad said.  “The jar to your brain will do you some good.”

Schuldig looked at him curiously. “You really are disturbingly inhuman, you know that?”

Brad held his arms out mockingly, “Would a hug make you feel better?”

Schuldig was really thrown out of step now.  “You are ruining my harsh.”

Brad let his arms drop and picked up his cup of coffee.  “Focus, Schuldig.  What have you to report, other than that he is in?”

“I report that I want to go back to Japan, where it’s civilized,” Schuldig stated and flopped down on the sofa, kicking off his running shoes and putting his feet up on the coffee table.  “They are wary of him.  Hidaka is all forgiveness and understanding, but the woman, Mihirogi Nana, she is suspicious.  Her mind is more complicated than the Manx woman.  She is used to being in more control of the team, and making more decisions on her own.  It’s her unquestioned word this Lord Krypton guy will be taking for Fujimiya.  And she is even more suspicious of ‘Kudoh’ just because he was such a slime ball when he worked over here a few times before.  I need to ask him what the hell he did to piss in this pot so well in advance.”

“Change out of those ridiculous shorts and we will both ask him,” Brad set his now empty cup down and buttoned his cuffs.  “I want to pay some calls on these people dealing in that Human Interleukin drug.  _Tot_!” he called toward the bathroom door.  “Are you done _yet?_ ”

“What have you been up to?” Schuldig asked, picking up a stray wisp of intent.

Tot came stomping out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel.  The fury of a woman scorned had nothing on a teen girl forced to dye her hair back to its natural color.  She could give Fujimiya glaring lessons, and that was saying a lot. 

“You look like the creepy girl in the Grudge movies,” Schuldig said. 

The pout shifted.  She pulled a lock of her wet black hair out at arm’s length to look at it. “Nagi-kun, can you float me to the ceiling?” she asked.

“ _Float?_ ” he stated.

“Levitate, elevate, uplift even, anything but ‘float’,” Schuldig warned. 

“Not in the towel,” Brad warned. 

Nagi blushed.  “Um, yeah, when you’re dressed,” he said. 

“What are you up to?” Schuldig asked Brad again.

“Tot is going to strike up a conversation with a certain Shinjou Kurumi about being a stranger in London,” he smirked. 

“Tot is going to be a spy!” she said gleefully.

Dolphins at sea rolled over in agony at the pain in their ears and headed for shore to beach themselves. 

“Before you go ballistic,” Nagi said, seeing the look of horror dawning on Schuldig’s face.  “Her cover is that she is over here on a work visa, modeling, and they tried to make her do something she did not want to do, so she walked.  They have her papers and she is stuck without English to deal.”

Schuldig’s ire faded, but he still frowned.  “You keep your knives where you can get to them,” he told the girl.  “If one of those foreign bastards so much as takes a step toward you, knife him in the balls to the hilt and twist.”

Eye wide, she nodded. “Hai!”

Nagi and Brad both winced.  Schuldig got up.  “I am going to go shower and wash as much of this bullshit city of me as I can,” he announced.  “That tub better not be black.” 

*     *     *

Yuuji had gone out and gotten ONE bottle of whiskey, and a pack of nicotine patches, along with sleeping pills.  He was still groggy when they knocked him up, and no where near awake. 

“Coffee,” Brad told Schuldig.  “You took sleeping pills with booze, are you out of your mind?”

“Temporary insanity has a valid place in the psychology dichotomy,” Yuuji mumbled, going back to the sofa where he had passed out the night before and flopping down on it.  He closed his eyes, and mimed putting an invisible phone to his ear.  “Hey, bossy man, I can’t come in today, my aunt died.  Again.” He fake hung up, sank deeper into the sofa cushions, threw an arm over his eyes, and prepared to go back to sleep. 

“Do I have to keep an eye on your future all the time from now on?” Brad complained, looking down at him. 

“It would be nice.  Little things like that can make a difference, you know.”

“Well are you happy now?” Brad demanded.

“Actually, the hangover feels quite refreshingly normal,” Yuuji said dully.  “Shoot me, please.”

Brad sighed. 

Schuldig figured out the curtesy pod thing and had the coffee going.  “These coffee makers are for retards, aren’t they?  People who don’t know how to make coffee with a complicated looking machine.  I want to go back to Japan where they just pour a little pot of hot water over the grounds in a thingie.”

“Stop whining,” Brad said.    

“I am going to whine until we go back to Japan!” Schuldig raised his voice in defiance.

“Plan,” Yuuji agreed. 

Brad smacked him on the side of his ass sharply.  “You are going to drink that coffee, get a shower, get dressed and come with us to harass people.  How the hell else are we supposed to call attention to ourselves so you can be ‘rescued’ and re-united with your little mental therapy pet?” He shoved Yuuji’s legs off the sofa.

“Well, now that you put it that way, good times,” Yuuji dragged himself to a sitting position, pushing his hair back and scratching his butt cheek through his underwear. 

“The sarcasm is strong with this one,” Schuldig said. 

“Jedi Jar,” Brad stated. 

“That really isn’t fair, since I actually _do_ have Jedi mind powers,” Schuldig complained. 

Yuuji looked up at the red head through bleary eyes.  “Does he really make you pay fines for movie references?”

“It’s his way of keeping me financially dependent on him so I can’t run away,” Schuldig shot Crawford an arch look.

“You wish,” Brad sneered, but his eyes smiled. 

“Alright,” Yuuji said, peeling the nicotine patch off his arm and sticking it to the coffee table’s surface.  “I’m ready to join the ranks of pod people, yes, I know, horrible pun,” he drawled, “but I blame the drugs and booze.  Better set up another cup the minute that one is out of the stand, too.  I can tell you right now from experience, it is a five cup morning.  So, who are we going to murder today?” He grumbled pushing his hair out of his face.

 

 


	4. Three

Chapter 3

Aya looked at the apron hanging on the hook.  It was blue.  He would not been able to handle it if it had been green.  He sighed, and reached up to unhook it and put it on.  He felt someone enter the room more than heard them do so.  Someone was either trying to sneak up on him or naturally quiet.  He looped the apron over his neck and caught the strings, turning as he tied it.  It was the tall Welshman. “Free-san,” he said calmly, wondering if the man wanted anything, or if he was simply swiping the other guy’s apron and had been caught.  There were no name tags. 

“Ken said you know Ikebana,” the man said in halting Japanese.

“Eh,” Aya answered.

“Yuki said If you would make some arrangements to show in the window, that would be good.”

“Ah,” Aya said, and finished tying on the apron.  So that was all.  He wished he’d been able to hang onto his cell phone, but what a give-a-way that would have been.  He just wanted to hear Yuuji—Yohji’s—voice this morning.  Last night had been awful.  He woke any number of times, wondering why the bed was so cold next to him, why no arms were around him, panicking a time or two, thinking he was back in Tokyo; that it had all been a dream, and he would get up out of bed come daylight and find that his sister was still in a coma. 

He shook his head to clear it.  Flowers.  Damn it.  He would design some displays for them, alright.  What Ken didn’t know is that all the effort Aya had put into his ikebana was simply the movements of a katana, the clever arcs of stem and branches imitating slashing and slicing, the calmness that came over Aya’s face when he was concentrating on his work not that of the requisite Zen, but the mindset he slipped into when fighting, his strokes and strikes slowed down to 0.1%. 

First he would kill Ken, then the German asshole, then he would make love to Yohji.  He smiled coolly, going to see what dishes and branches they had to match his plans.   

  *     *     *

“Presumably, the money from the illegal drug running Blue Eyes is doing is funding Grancoster-Wells’ experiments,” Brad said in the Range Rover.  “But what this has to do with our enhanced spy still puzzles me.  He was talent, and surgically assisted somehow, this drug is aimed at making super humans.”

“Sounds like something out of Shinjuku,” Yuuji said behind him in the second row of seats. “You don’t think something got out, do you?”

“Let’s hope not,” Schuldig said.  “But with the crap Takatori Masafumi was working on, do you really think someone else wouldn’t have the same idea?  After all, Esset’s entire organization, is the product of all that super soldier stuff in the first place.”

“I still can’t believe you would let that girl loose in London,” Yuuji commented. He’d only just learned of the plan for Tot.

“She has to be tested sometime,” Brad said, watching for the signal light to change at a stop.  The light changed, but he stubbornly kept the SUV there. 

Horns began to honk. 

“Brad,” Yuuji said.  “Did you just check out again?  The light’s changed.”

A car ran the red light just then, going about twice the speed limit, and a car coming opposite them got slammed across the front bumper and knocked up on to the curb.  Brad calmly wove around the accident, leaving the honkers behind to contemplate this on their own.

“I should have known better,” Yuuji said apologetically.

“Yes, you should,” Brad said.

“This whole Welsh Independence thing is bullshit,” Schuldig opined.  “The addicts and cops on the take in the USA who supplied them, the soccer players, it’s all just an easy way to get people to take the drug and be experimented on.  I think they found out that if you take volunteers from death row you get super criminals, no?”

“It takes some people a long time to learn a simple lesson,” Brad answered.  “Still, who put that implant in the guy’s head and sicced him on Esset’s Rosencruz for a trial run?”

Brad wanted to know who was behind that more than how to deal with this enhancing drug. _‘Lightening strike, gentlemen,’ he had told them earlier.  ‘We get in, get the info, and get out.  I don’t want any dead bodies and I don’t want anyone to know what hit them.  We get the information and then sit back and watch the ants in their little farm to see what happens next.  If they are the target of the organization that attacked Rosencruz, leave the bait in the trap.’_

Brad found a parking place for guests and drove in.  Yuuji got out, pulling his hair back into a pony tail and putting a band on it.  He then grabbed a lab coat off the seat where it had lain beside him and put it on.  A `man bag’ went over his shoulder.  He had a lanyard around his neck, but the end was tucked into the pocket of the shirt, out of sight under the coat.  It looked like he had stuck his badge into the pocket to keep it from catching in his seat belt or swinging around on his way to work.  He strode off around the corner and into the building’s employee entrance.

“Is he alright?” Brad asked.

“His mind is compartmentalized,” Schuldig answered.  “He’s very good at sectioning things off and concentrating on the task at hand. I suppose that is why you find him attractive.”

Brad looked at him. “Seriously?  You’re starting this now?” he asked mildly. 

Schuldig avoided looking at him, instead becoming very interested in the convoluted dash of the vehicle with all its cup holders and surfaces.

“One, I find you attractive because you are.  Two, we agreed not to have this argument over and over, remember?  Three, I’m a hell of a lot more shallow about who I want to fuck than you give me credit for. I could care less about how your mind _works_ , you idiot telepath, as long as you are useful, so make yourself useful.”

Schuldig frowned at him. 

Brad waited, looking at him coolly.

“He is in,” Schuldig grumbled.  /And so am I./

*     *     * 

Yuuji walked into the employee’s entrance and surreptitiously passed his palm over his mouth, to all eyes seeing, politely covering a yawn.  He strode up to the desk, noted the name on the receptionist’s tag and smiled. “Hi, Julie, little late, I hope the boss isn’t hunting me,” he reached over to pat her hand on the phone.  “Do me a favor and say nothing,” he winked at her.

She looked at him puzzled, then turned the book.  “You still have to sign in.  And don’t fudge the time, or I’ll catch hell for it.”  The struggle to recognize him was going on in her head.

He winked at her and smiled, then scribbled a name into the book.  Not one of the above, that would not do, people remembered names when faces were before them.  Instead he used the illegible scrawl of the highly trained medicine.  /Is she going to fall for it?/ he inquired of Schuldig.

/The sad thing is she wants to,/ the German murmured in his mind. 

/Who’s side are you on?/ Yuuji checked the time on the clock over her head and wrote it down.  “Ah well, they can’t have late nights without a few late mornings,” he smiled grimly at her and turned the book back for her. 

/Head for the corridor to the left./ Schuldig said. 

He turned and started walking confidently toward the hallway, exactly how someone late for work would stride, a little fast, a little reluctant to call attention to himself.    

Julie sat there looking at his signature and desperately trying to place him, the bit of DNA on the back of her hand working its dreadful influence on her.  

*    *    *

Aya focused a critical eye on the arrangement.  The red bird of paradise blossoms did not quite approximate the spray of blood he had in mind, but it would do.  The dried lotus seed cup below it did a good job of being a sliced head.

Yuki-kun was not happy about the extra expense of the flowers he had been told to go out and purchase.  Aya could have laughed.  He had been the same way, obsessing over every penny, to distract himself from the more horrible things in life.  “They will sell for ten times as much, if you price them so,” Aya assured the teen.  “Just put a sign up and announce that there is an Ikebana expert from Tokyo who will be here for the season.  Make sure you put Exclusive across the top of the sign, and send one gratis to the local chief society lady with a card.”

Yuki’s eyes widened a bit at the vista opened before him, then nodded. “Yes, Sensei,” he said solemnly.

Aya’s mouth twitched into something like a smile and a grimace had mated at the honorific title.  “That’s going a bit far…”

“The English customers will fall for it,” Yuki stated. 

Aya raised an eyebrow, then after one more walk around the arrangement, told himself to settle for it and put it aside on the shelf to pick up the dish for the last one.   

“We should get you a kimono to wear,” Yuki added as an after thought. 

Aya realized the mess he had gotten himself into.  “No.”  He picked out one of the stems of rounded petal white orchids he had chosen and slotted it into the support spike.  He had already drilled the holes into a piece of driftwood that would act as a base in the dish. 

“Why did they dye your hair that strange color?” Yuki asked.  “The roots are not even black, it must have been recent.”

Aya looked at him.  “Yuki-kun,” he said as calmly as possible.  “How long have you been out of the country?”

Yuki colored a little.  “I don’t know,” he said.

“Not amnesia,” Aya said with dismay he could barely hide. 

“I was really little when my parents were transferred,” Yuki said. 

“Well, it shows,” Aya said, focusing on his manipulations of the flower spray, turning the dish and changing it as the light caught the iridescence of the white petals.  “This _is_ my hair color.”  Obviously Ken had not told anyone about this.

“Really?” Yuki reached up to flick some out of the way to check further.

Aya flinched and tossed his head to shake the hair back into place, shooting him a warning glare.  “How young were you when you lost your parents?”

“I don’t remember,” Yuki said.  “A—a friend took me in.  We were all orphans.” 

Aya frowned.  “I think that covers all of us in one way or another,” he said, looking at the irises.  He had specified half open blossoms and buds of the Japanese iris, not the big blousy Dutch type.  The iris would be taller than the orchids, and he blushed, thinking of the emotion he wished to portray.  Maybe he didn’t want to give this one away, though the choice of flowers and their glittering petals would make it very attractive to women. 

“I read online that Ikebana done right conveys an emotion to the viewer,” Yuki said, looking at the lotus pod and bird of paradise arrangement. “What are you going for here?”

Aya could have smashed the dish over his head.  “What do you think it expresses?” he asked primly.

“Something pretty to sell fast,” Yuki grinned.

“There you have it,” Aya stated mildly.  He wondered what Yuuji was doing now?  He played with the level of the orchid, trying to decide.  Chest or…. He blushed, and made himself stop obsessing.  He couldn’t very well think about such things with Yuki watching. 

*     *     *

Yuuji wasn’t trying to infiltrate the lab. His job was to deal with security.  It didn’t matter if the telepath could convince people they didn’t see him, he would show up on video.  Yuuji located the security center of the building and walked in.  The two men there on duty turned to stare at him.  “There’s something wrong with the camera in the lab,” Yuuji said.  “It’s making a weird noise, and it smells like plastic heating up.” Yuuji sneezed.  “Ah, excuse me, allergies.”  He pulled out a handkerchief.

One of the men turned to check a monitor.  People on the screen were going about their business without paying any attention to the camera.

But it was too late.  Yuuji had pulled a small device out of his lab coat pocket and cupped the handkerchief over his nose and mouth, along with the air filter mask hidden in it.

The guards out cold from the sleeping gas , he went through the monitors one by one, setting them to loop the past three hours of video.  He checked to make certain that this was the only security station.  More and more companies were setting up back ups.  With all the money going into the research, they must not have wanted to stretch the budget that far.  This was the only recording station.  /You’re free and clear,/ he thought at the telepath.

/Meet us in the lab,/ Schuldig told him.  

Together, the three of them stripped the lab computers of all their secrets, while the workers sat at their individual stations, completely oblivious.  Schuldig would normally have exhausted himself keeping so many people under control, but Yuuji’s ‘talent’ made them pliant and docile, like laughing gas without the big joke.  Schuldig caught anyone coming in and fielded them to Yuuji for a good smear of his saliva.  Gross, but effective. 

“This stuff can do some serious damage,” Brad said at one of the computers.  “It enhances the body’s natural production of steroids, but it also morphs the muscle tissue.  The side effects are increased anger and paranoia, _who did not see that coming…_?” he added in a bit of a sing-song voice.  “Since steroids boost the body’s natural immune system, it also affects healing, making it progress faster.  That would explain why they have been injuring their subjects.  However it does cause more scaring in muscle and skin tissues due to the faster healing, soft tissue not so much.  This is nothing Esset needs, or would want.” He disengaged the flash drive he had been downloading files into.  “We need merely be prepared to come up with a counter drug to these so called super soldiers.”

“It gives me a chill to think that the Elders would have loved to get their wrinkled old claws on this crap,” Schuldig said, looking over at him from beside the door.      

“There are too many others who would grab it up with out thinking of the consequences,” Brad responded.  “Now let’s get out of here while we still have time to prevent someone clueing into a security breach.” 

“Do you want me to put a glitch in?” Schuldig asked, looking around the room at the happily ignoring them crew.

Brad considered this.  Then smirked evilly.  “Why not.  Lets see what the result will be.”

They waited patiently while he traced down the results of all the variations a small innocuous change in the formula might incur.  

“There is one part of the formula,” Brad said, trying to describe the concept for Schuldig to look for.

/Just let me see,/ the telepath reminded him. 

Brad sighed and let him run through his memory.  It made him light headed, he did not like the sensation at all.  But it worked and that was what mattered.

Schuldig picked out the exact place in the formula and grinned.  “What fuckery,” he said aloud and then spread the glitch to all the lab workers present.  It would now be an insistent truth in all their minds, that  one little change, being ‘corrected’ every time someone saw that formula. 

 

   

 

     

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 4

 

Chapter 4

Tot was ready to go.  She wore a pair of artfully tattered and embroidered jeans, with a gauzy blouse with a de-con-re-constructed denim jacket to cover it; a ‘look’ cobbled up from the latest fashion runway videos and a credit card.  Low heeled shoes in bright blue, red and white British flag print, and a scrubbed face finished the effect.  The clothing was brand new for a reason.  Her hair had dried to very dark brown rather than black, and was more natural looking. 

She was not happy.  Rabbi-chan was getting the worst of that. 

“You can’t take Rabbi-chan with you,” Nagi was telling her.  “ _Guys_ , do something,” he pleaded as they came in the door to the suite.

Brad frowned.  “Tot, are you obstructing the mission?”

She shook her head, eyes down, hugging the toy rabbit. 

“She is obstructing the mission,” Schuldig asserted.  “She’s having a minor break down.  The girl in the mirror is the one she buried,” he told Brad, tapping his own cheek bone.  “This is not going to work.  And then there is Hidaka, she will recognize him and boom, not pretty, unless I defuse that little time bomb as well.”

“Do it,” Brad said.  “But leave her alone otherwise.  We can’t have this continuing.  Tot, listen to me,” he caught her by the chin and made her look up at him.  “This--,” he gave her head a little waggle, “is a disguise.  This is your cover.  I could shave your head and tattoo your face and you would still be Tot inside, do you understand?  Tot is Tot, and no one can make you be other than Tot.”

This sunk in.  She sniffled, then nodded. 

He let her go.  She looked down at Rabbi-chan, and smoothed his short fake fur, then looked at Nagi and thrust the bunny out to him. 

Nagi took it and tucked it into his arm carefully, then smiled encouragingly at her. 

“Who is Hidaka?” she asked Schuldig blankly.

“Never you mind,” he said, putting a hand on her head to pat her, then grasped her pate and got to work. 

“ _Gods,_ was that _empathy_?” Yuuji asked Brad mockingly, a bit amazed.

“I took the same courses in psychological manipulation you did, remember?” Brad said as coldly as ever.

“Ah,” Yuuji said, grinning at him.  “For a  moment you had me fooled.”

“Ass,” Brad said. 

*    *     *

Aya was blindsided by the Mihirogi woman coming back that afternoon and taking him off to the psychiatric hypnotist.  On the way, he thought about the doctor that had brain washed Yuuji and how they had been instructed to take people they had been ordered to capture alive to him.  He also thought about how nice the car was and that some day he would have one like it; without the driver, of course.  He preferred to keep hold of the wheel himself.  He wondered what her real relationship to this Lord Kripton was, then decided it was none of his business.    

“Are any of your memories coming back now that you have been out of their influence for twenty-four hours?” Mihirogi-san asked.

“It’s still just a blur,” he said quietly. 

She regarded him through her lorgnette as if he actually were a specimen behind glass.  “But you had the sense to run, and Kudoh did not.”

“He isn’t known for having too much sense,” Aya said with a rueful smile. 

She absorbed this, her eyes lowering a bit.  She smoothed her skirt over her knee.    

Women, Aya thought.  They either fell head over heels for that jack ass, or they hated him.  The strong willed ones fended him off the best. He wondered about that power of Yuuji’s.  Maybe it really was pretty weak.  Or maybe women were just that simplistic; they either loved or hated.  Either way, they had never interested _him_ as much as society assumed a man should be interested. 

He realized something.  If he were going to get through this hypnosis thing, he had better keep his wits about him.  They said that if a hypnotist asked you to do something you absolutely would not normally consider doing, you wouldn’t. 

He knew that the ‘something’ inside him frightened the telepath. He needed to find a way to let that side take over again, the way it had when he struck the post down in the haunted house, and set the Kami free in Rosencruz.  It was a scary thought, letting something take over.  More so than the telepath, because this was the side of himself he had refused to deal with for so long.  The side that only came out when he was ready to draw his sword. 

He was afraid that if he deliberately let it out in a non-combat situation, he would end up standing in someone’s blood.  That would fuck up the whole assignment. 

If he screwed up, Crawford would take Yuuji away.  This, he felt absolutely certain of.  And he couldn’t bear that. 

“Fujimiya,” Mihirogi-san said again.

He blinked, shook his head a little and looked at her. 

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“I was just—well, maybe this will work,” he said carefully.  “But I don’t know why they took us in the first place.  Why they would take us out of Japan.”

“We have some theories based on what your Persia has told us, but I will save them for after your session with Doctor Bhatia.  I would not want to compromise your response.”

Ah, but she just had.  He had to think like an Esset agent now, rather than Weiss.  He had to assume that Omi knew about their defection, knew Yuuji had been the one to set the bomb on his grandfather’s estate, and possibly a hell of a lot more that was close to the truth. 

His first instinct was to simply pull the knife from one of his boots, kill her, over power the driver and be done with it.  But that wasn’t going to get the results he had been sent to get. 

‘Lucky’, that blasted German kept calling him in English. Well, perhaps it was time to rely on that.    

*     *     *

Tot sat down and checked the heel of her shoe, then started rubbing her ankle, looking as forlorn as anyone in her supposed position would have felt.  The forlorn part was fact.  If Nagi had not been there, tailing her from a safe distance, she wasn’t sure she would have been able to do it. In a strange city, where people spoke English mixed with other languages, and so many people, so many different people, not just the English, but people from darker corners of the world.  Some were very scary with their habitual scowls, and hoodies, and the way their eyes looked pure hate at her.  She swallowed and looked away, trusting Nagi with everything she had.   

Crawford-san had said to sit exactly here, until the girl Schuldig-kun had put the image of in her mind came along.  If she had to sit here too long, maybe the mean looking men would come closer and bother her, then Nagi would have to deal with them, and it would all go wrong.  She hoped not.  She felt stripped of her abilities, exposed and helpless.  Then she remembered what Schuldig-kun had said, and smiled a little.  She was a grudge, revenge waiting to happen.  She was Tot.  She was  Death. 

The girl she was looking for came walking along the sidewalk with a sack of groceries. 

*     *     *

Dr. Bhatia’s establishment was a typical doctor’s office.  A claustrophobic waiting room with a counter, then the receptionist/nurse opened a door to a short hall and one of two rooms, this one larger than the waiting room, with a sturdy clinical recliner rather than an exam table.  The rest was the usual sink counter with a cupboard over and under, bio-hazards and sharps wall boxes, and rolling stools. 

Aya sat down in the reclining chair.  All the while he had been willing himself not to be so tense.  It wasn’t working. 

The doctor looked him over critically.  “You’re very tense.  You need to be relaxed and comfortable for this to work.”  He went to a cupboard and got out a hypodermic and a small bottle. 

“No drugs,” Aya stated.  His English was not that good but he could at least make that clear.

“This is only a very mild muscle relaxer,” Doctor Bhatia finished measuring the dose, and set the little bottle down on the counter by the sink.  “It will wear off after an hour or so; plenty of time for us to see what we can see.”

“It’s no more than what you would have going to a dentist,” Mihirogi-san said.  “You’ll be fine.”

Aya refused to give into panic as the doctor swabbed his arm and applied the needle.  It slid in with a small prick of pain, and the medicine stung briefly as it entered.  Aya swallowed hard.  Nothing had happened to prevent this, so nothing was going to happen, he told himself.  He felt his body begin to melt a little, despite his tension.  It was like being drunk, only he felt it go deeper.  After all the tension of the past weeks, this did not feel all that bad.  He sighed deeply. 

And slid down a long black slide. 

“Doctor?” Mihirogi said, seeing the young man go limp.  “You gave him too much.”

“No,” he protested, checking the man’s eyes carefully. He realized in brief shock that those were not contacts. “He shouldn’t be completely unconscious.” 

“Is it a bad reaction?  An allergy?” she asked curtly.

The Doctor checked Aya’s pulse.  “Breathing, heart rate, he seems fine,” he was confused, worried.  “I gave him only the minimum dose.  Is he taking any other medications?”

“He said not,” she frowned, worried.  “He could be over sensitized to something.  We have no idea of how they were keeping control of him.”

*     *     *

“This is going to take months, isn’t it?” Schuldig grumbled, picking at his basket of fish and chips. 

“It will move along faster the closer we get,” Brad assured him.  “You know by now how my talent works.”  The closer he got to the specific timeline, the more he could see the necessary actions to take in advance.  He sipped his imported German lager.  He had decided after the sheep incident he most definitely did not like ale.  Nor mutton, for that matter.  He shuddered a little and swallowed more beer. 

Yuuji was fidgeting again.  

Schuldig looked at the blond Japanese.  “He will be fine, we all know this.”

“He will,” Brad assured him as well.  “Worry more about yourself.  I don’t like the way this Weiss thing is affecting you.”

“I don’t exactly like it either,” Yuuji shot him a miserable look, twisting his beer bottle on the scratched up table top, then lifting it to take a huge swallow. 

The shop was a bit shabby, but the food was fresh and good.  Who needed Siri when you had a telepath to read the cook’s mind? 

Said telepath was not happy.  Esset would not be happy with this, Brad thought, _if_ he were the sort of asshole who reported on his team’s day to day working conditions.  With the Three out of their hair, he wondered how much the organization would slide down before the original jackboot mentality kicked in to save it?  Yuuji was balancing a split personality that had been professionally split for him, Schuldig was cranky because he was not in an environment he preferred, preference never being a matter of choice in Esset.  You went where you were sent, did what you were told, killed who needed killing.   

The sad fact was that he had been promising freedom, and here they were, back in the same old rut.  He sighed and had another bite of the crispy battered fish, not giving a damn for the cholesterol levels as long as they didn’t use that fake oil.  Good food was the one constant in this life and he would be damned if he would go without, or if presented with anything less, that the cook would survive. 

He paused, his attention distracted.  “Tot is in,” he announced. 

His phone vibrated.  He wiped his fingers carefully on a paper napkin and drew it out of his inner jacket pocket on the fourth ring.  “Crawford.”

“She’s in,” Nagi reported, sounding a little stressed.  “Schuldig was right, this place is becoming a hell hole.  If I had had to hold off any more would be creepos, it would have become a flash street performance of mimes in a glass box.”

Brad had to smile at that one.  “Come and join us,” he gave him the directions.  “And no, you can not have a beer.”

Nagi sighed the angsty sigh only the brutal injustice of being a teenager can produce and hung up.

Yuuji went to the counter to get another round of beer. 

Schuldig rolled his eyes, made a fish face-kissing motion and sipped his beer primly. 

“He’s fine,” Brad said.  “For now.  Just thirsty.”

“I don’t like the sound of that ‘for now’,” Tiffany blue eyes focused on him warningly. He leaned over to speak more confidentially. “I don’t like the idea of ’Kudoh’ becoming dominant again.  That drunk he went on last night was not a good thing.”

“It’s just the withdrawals from nicotine, and he’s over thinking it,” Brad watched Yuuji narrowly avoid a fairly pretty woman on his way back, excusing himself and flashing that devastating smile at her.  He also noted how the woman turned to watch him go on his way, her biological clock reset to timer count down and ticking.  He frowned.

“Don’t talk to _me_ about over thinking,” Schuldig said, leaning back again. 

Yuuji set a trio of bottles down, two from one hand, one from the other.  “What?” he protested, questioning Brad’s look, even though from long experience, he knew exactly what it was about.

“Nothing,” Brad said lightly and had a swallow of beer. 

“Bitch, please,” Yuuji complained dryly and sat down to open his third bottle.   

/Interesting,/ Schuldig commented to Brad mentally.  /What ever that was all about, it has settled him./

/The ties that bind,/ Brad thought back at him. 

/Unfortunately now he wants to do something scandalous in the men’s room,/ Schuldig growled. 

/Fat chance, same as always,/ Brad ate his fish. 

Nagi’s arrival derailed that conversation before it even had to be had.  “This is a plot isn’t it?  First you get rid of Fujimiya, now Tot.  ”

“Give it up,” Brad said,  “You’re too young to even think about _not_ having sex tonight.”

“I’m _sixteen_ ,” Nagi stated.  “Sex is all I think about.”  He blushed furiously.

Schuldig snorted and choked on his swallow of beer.  Yuuji had to thump him on the back. 

Brad frowned, realizing he had just been check mated. He had almost threated to handcuff the boy to the bed posts from now until he was 21 but that would have A. Sounded very wrong; B. Been useless as he could; sub a, break the handcuffs or the bed post; sub b, use his telekinesis, and from there it all just went very much more wrong.  C. How the hell had he gotten into this mess! “Oh, shut up,” he ordered.  

Nagi stuck his tongue out at him and stole one of Yuuji’s fried potato slices, sitting down in the last chair at the table. 

Schuldig wiped the tears from his eyes and snickered, then looked at Brad.  “Attention NASA, the chicken has roosted.”

“There’s beer in the batter, am I supposed to starve?” Nagi asked, looking at the menu. 

“The alcohol cooks out,” Brad said, irritation showing.

“But it’s still beer,” Nagi said stubbornly, and got a waitress’ attention by calling out, rather than sitting there helplessly waiting to be noticed.  

“Fine have the broiled fish with steamed veg and rice, suit yourself,” Brad groused.

“Battered cod, double portion, forget the chips,” Nagi ordered.  “And a salad, with Pepsi.” He handed the menu back, giving Brad the same archly superior smirk he had learned from him.

“Stop, you are frightening me,” Schuldig told the two of them.  “After lunch, I will check on those two and make everyone happy, no?” he looked at Yuuji.

Yuuji had finished half his new bottle of beer already, looking pretty grim.  “Yeah.”     

 

 

 

    


	6. Five

   
  
Aya was shocked when Tot turned up; realizing who the pale, thin, dark haired, brown eyed young woman was counted for half the disbelief.  Why had they put her here, too?  To spy on him?  They could do that easily enough by just having that shit head German hang around.     
She was chatting with Kurumi-chan—that had to be it.  The girl could act.  Her breaking down and sobbing over the situation she was in could have almost been real.  Maybe it was, he thought, remembering how wound up she normally was most of the time.  There was something very fragile in the girl, as if she were an armored shell over something deeply wounded.  And wounded creatures fought back with all their might.  He should know.     
/Over thinking, Lucky/ a voice warned in his head.  
“Shit!” He was carving down a root ball to repot a house plant and nearly caught his fingers with the wicked curved blade.  /Damn it, Schuldig!/ he swore at the bastard.     
/Schise, what did I just step in? Eugh….this is your fault, isn’t it?/ the annoyance came through.     
Aya smirked.  /What do you want?/    
/Report, you ass,/ the german was scrapping his boot off on something, it came through as clear as if Aya could feel himself doing so; even catching a whiff of the smell.  He hated this telepathy thing.  /Since you can’t exactly call us every five minutes, I am checking up on you, duh./  
Aya sighed in annoyance and picked up the root knife again.  /Do I have to tell you everything in detail, or can you just get it./  
/What are you; lazy?  Fine, don’t blame me if you black out—and put that knife down.  I don’t want to break my leg or something because you might have cut yourself./  
Aya put the knife down and leaned on the table, not sure what the hell would—damn!     
/Crap, now they will try something more dangerous,/ was Schuldig’s opinion.  
Aya fought the vertigo and nausea and was left clutching the table for support.  Okaaaay, next time he would communicate politely.     
/Lesson learned,/ Schuldig sneered in his mind.  /And you are right about Tot. Let her do her job and you do yours.  The less you know about her mission, the less you can fuck it up.  We need to figure out a way to convince them to hypnotize you without the drugs and I will take over./  
/Why don’t you convince them?  You’re the telepath./ Aya thought.  
He felt the blink of the German’s thinking.  /Crawford approves of your initiative.  I have been wanting to find out what is up with this woman and Sarazawa—which reminds me.  He is going nuts without you.  You are his Rabbi-chan,/ the snickering laugh in his skull creeped Aya out.     
But Schuldig was gone before he could ask about Yuuji.     
He plunked the now pruned plant into its new pot with a trowel full of fresh dirt to tamp down around it and set it aside.  He washed his hands, trying to stop the downward spiral he saw coming.  If only he could call Yuuji and hear his voice.  Was he addicted to the man’s peculiar body chemistry?  Was that all this was about?     
He stood thinking about it, drying his hands, then holding the towel, frowning, eyes unfocused on the here and now.  Was it just an addiction?  And if it was, so what?  If Schuldig said Yuuji was missing him just as much, so what?     
It was pathetic, that’s what.  He was worrying himself silly like the Tokyo school girls who crowded the flower shop.  Next he would be calling Omi for advice!  He threw the towel on the rack and told himself to suck it up and be a man.  He had a job to do.     
And if Tot could let go of her Rabbi-chan long enough to do it, then so could he, he smiled ruefully.     
*     *     *  
“We need to find the Mihirogi woman,” Brad announced, starting the SUV.  “I have to blame jet lag for the fact that your boytoy is coming up with better ideas than me.”  
“Excuses, excuses,” Yuuji said, mildly teasing.  “If these drug guys aren’t behind that spy, who is?  The Russians have been experimenting with this sort of thing for ages, and the Americans were for a little while, too. Did they pick back up?”  
“You’re talking governments, but what about individual parties?  I keep going back to the idea that it’s got to be private.  Anything a government does creates huge ripples and we would be done by now.”  
Schuldig got into the front passenger seat at the corner stoplight.  “Typical Kritiker, slow as molasses.  We get the woman.” He half turned to look at Yuuji in the back seat.  “You are never going to get rescued at this rate.”  
“More like shot on sight,” Yuuji agreed.    
“What ever did you do to her?” Brad asked him via the rear view mirror as he turned the steering wheel to head for Lord Kripton’s residence.    
“Me?” the blond metaphorically pulled innocence out of a hat.     
“We’ll find out anyway,” Schuldig chuckled evilly.     
“Well, tell me when you do,” Yuuji said in mild self defense.  “Those drunken binges don’t exactly come with body cam vid, you know.”  
“Perhaps we should put one on you,” Brad offered.     
“You’d have loved that, wouldn’t you?  More death and destruction.”  
Brad laughed.  “You mean blackmail fodder.  If your mother found out what you had been up to…”  
“Don’t you dare!” Yuuji exclaimed.     
“Can we just find the woman and behave like professionals?” Schuldig asked.    
Brad looked at him oddly.    
Schuldig glared at him and then went into a sulk.    
*     *     *      
 Nana Mihirogi was at her desk in the mansion’s business office.  The day to day running of the Estate and various properties, along with the accounts and so forth, required a certain amount of her time as Lord Kripton’s personal assistant.  The Major Domo handled the household itself, but hers was the final signature on the expenses.  Once that was done, she could go back to trying to trace the human interleukin project’s initiator.    
 So far, she had only gotten as far as the consortium behind Grancoster-Wells, many of whom on the board were simply investors with no real connection to the company other than as a source of interest income.  Some one was behind the consortium, but the trail had thinned to the information equivalent of a morning mist; there but briefly and then gone.  Who ever they were, they were very, very good at hiding their trail.  That meant big money and long standing power.  Could it be Esset?  The damned Nazis had been playing around with drugs and selective breeding for years.     
/Now isn’t that interesting,/ a voice both smooth and burred like the purr of a cheshire cat said in her mind in strangely accented Japanese.    
She startled, looking around.     
/Or would you prefer I used English?/ the voice queried with amusement. /Though I keep the accent unless otherwise necessary, it is my own./  
“Who are you?  What is happening!” she demanded, looking for a stranger or some where a speaker could have been placed. Security was not outrageous at the manor; too much would have seemed preposterous, but surely no one could have gotten in to plant devices.   She hit the button on her desk for the security guards.  It wouldn’t do to give herself away too soon, not knowing what she was up against.    
/My apologies, Frau Mihirogi, but your security is unavailable.  Off line, you might say./  Schuldig had left them sound asleep, with looping dreams that were hard to resist wanting to remain in.  It would take a good bit of doing to release them until their bodies called foul.  /I suggest you sit still, this is going to be a bumpy ride, and you might fall off that high horse of yours and damage your mind./  
Mihirogi’s eyes rolled up to the whites as her brain was hijacked by an expert.     
Schuldig sifted through her memory like someone flipping through a book; pausing at little things that caught his interest, picking at things that might come in handy regarding Krypton Brand later, but more interested in the work already done to isolate the makers of Human Interleukin 1 and 2.  It still came down to Grancoster-Wells.  They had to find out who was behind the Gordian knotted dead end of dummy corporations.     
He sighed.  This was going to take old fashioned foot work to solve.  What a drag. This meant sitting around waiting for someone to think about their evil bosses so he could latch onto that mind.  He had to find a way out of this before it became a rut.  Brad didn’t like being slowed down, and listening to him bitch was not a happy when one was on the receiving end.        
He rummaged about in the woman’s mind some more, and found that this Edward Krotznic was involved with something he had not reported on yet.  Maybe that was the way to go.     
He half forgot to check her memory for ‘Kudoh’, and laughed softly at the incidents this pulled up.  That would teach her to try to use an undercover mission to get cozy with a co-worker.  Sarazawa must have fallen back on his training by habit, playing the part to perfection, only to drop it when it wasn’t necessary.  Mihirogi had tried to play with fire, only to get herself hot and bothered.  The utterly clueless unconcern on his face after the fact when she tried flirting with him alone after the debriefing was the most bitter memory she had of the blond bastard.    
This reminded him to take care of the problem with Aya.  That done, he wiped her mind of any memory of this invasion and sauntered out of the Kripton estate unnoticed by anyone.     
*     *     *  
“Krotznic,” Brad repeated the name, and mentally checked out; his pupils expanding, cocoa-brown irises going golden.  The static wash of rushing water filled Schuldig’s head and he backed off from their link, focusing on anything but the abyss the precog was looking into.     
“Interesting,” Brad came back.     
“Do I get a pat on the head?” Schuldig grinned teasingly.     
Brad gave him a disapproving look, knowing full well where that head would be positioned.  “We grab Krotznic.”  
“You can not see his future in this?” Schuldig was annoyed.  He had done his part, he had better not hear one thing about it.     
“It’s complicated.  His path is not chosen yet,” Brad said.  “And stop bitching about things that haven’t happened yet; that’s my thing.”  
Schuldig narrowed his eyes at this infuriating man.     
“You had that look on your face,” Brad patted his cheek.     
“I don’t suppose we could think about lunch?” Yuuji said dully from the back seat.  He had put on his sunglasses to cut the glare off the tall buildings.  The hangover had worn off.  In its place was now a sense of pressure from the programmed personality that grated on his nerves like the bad habit it technically was.      
“Excellent idea,” Brad said.  “We’ll grab lunch and then Krotznic.  He appears to be KB’s lone wolf.  Lets see what happens when you put two obnoxious blonds at each other throats,” he smiled at Yuuji in the rearview mirror.     
“Are you using me as bait?” Yuuji accused in a jaded drawl.     
“Actually I was thinking you could just attack him,” Brad said with feigned innocence.     
“Boring,” Yuuji slouched in his seat, sunglasses making his eyes unreadable.     
“He fights with poisoned darts disguised in roses,” Brad informed him.     
Yuuji pursed his lips slightly in a tight scowl.  
“He has a trained owl, of all things, to act as a distraction.”     
Yuuji hooked his glasses down with one finger to peer over them.  “You’re bullshitting me.  Another guy with a damned trained bird?”  
“Word of honor,” Brad said.  “Of course—if you think you can’t handle it…”  
“Fuck you, you manipulative bastard,” Yuuji looked at his watch. “What’s for lunch?” he pulled out one of the little weights and let it snap back.     
*     *     *     
Edward Krotznic, who for some reason answered to ‘Chloe’ rather than Kroie for short, (Public school and the tendency to cutesify last names) was brought up short when confronted by the lanky blond Japanese who blocked his path.  At first it seemed like a miss step; but no, the guy blocked him again with a smile.  “You have something of mine,” he said pleasantly in slightly accented English.    
“I don’t know what you mean…” Edward was off tracked. His mind had been full of his own problems.  Christine’s decision to marry someone else had come so completely out of the blue.  Finding out the way he had had really knocked him up on the kerb.  He’d been friend-zoned for so long, he had thought things would go on the same way until he had time to change them himself.  At the heart of his dilemma, there was a sort of self loathing going on over her being blind, and thinking that no one would replace him in her lost sight.  He’d been wondering if he truly did deserve to be right where he’d got.     
Realizing something was off here, he moved a hand toward the inside of his tweed jacket.    
Yuuji mirrored the move, taking off his sunglasses and tucking them into the inner pocket of his own thin leather jacket.  “Fujimiya, Krotznic.  KB has him and you’re their number one boy; so here we are,” he spread his hands a little at shoulder level; a sign of empty handed harmlessness (unless you were an expert in karate, that is.)  
This clicked into place.  The red headed pretty boy, Ex-Weiss.  Esset.  This was the other one.  “You’re Weiss’ Balinese, right?”  
“So much for secret code identities,” Yuuji said, remembering that he was supposed to be brainwashed, after all.  This was getting far too amusingly trite to be amusing.  He would get Brad back for this one.  “Where is KB holding Fujimiya?” he stated, watching that hand in the lower periphery of his vision.  
Krotznic kept very still, waiting for this guy to make the first move.  London’s many, many electronic eyes normally deterred all but the most stupidly determined criminals, or those who traveled in camera obscuring packs, surrounding their victim, leaving someone collapsed on the sidewalk as if nothing had to do with them.     
They were in the open, with no covering crowd at the moment.  And, presumably, Nana wanted the guy alive; though he’d noticed she got that ‘there is a cockroach in my salad’ look on her face when Kudoh was mentioned.  “Look, I don’t know what’s going on.  Ken Hidaka found your guy collapsed in an alley after some Paki shit heads got to him.  He told us who Fujimiya was; we took him in and patched him up.  We didn’t know anyone was looking for him.”  Strange, but there seemed to be a lot of stray Japanese being rescued by KB lately.  “He said he didn’t remember much of anything since Tokyo, but he took some pretty hard blows to the head,” he let his hand drift down to his side again as casually as possible.  “I’ll take you to him.”  
‘I’ve been had,’ Yuuji thought. /Shuu, you tell Brad I am going to punch his lights out when this is over./  
/You can try,/ Schuldig sighed with a bitter amusement.  /Just make sure he is not standing too close to a wall./ The faintly remembered pain from a broken fist came through before he suppressed it.  
/And how many broken bones did it take you to learn that?/ Yuuji slid his hands into the pockets of his slacks, opting to exhibit a mild confusion until he had things under control.  Too bad Krotznic had been on foot, the closed confines of a car would have hastened his effect.     
Krotznic was jumpy as a cat.  “How did you and Fujimiya end up in London?”     
“What?” Yuuji glanced at him.     
“Persia reported you missing in action, how did you end up here in London?”    
“Did he?” Yuuji frowned.  “You said Abyssinian was attacked and injured?”  
“Jumped by a gang of thugs, according to Siberian,” Krotznic glanced at him as they walked.  “When did you leave Tokyo?”  
Yuuji’s frown deepened.  “A day or so ago.  There was a bomb scare or something,” he acted like he was trying to remember.  “Siberian only found Fujimiya?”  
“How did you know Krypton Brand had him?” Krotznic asked flat out.  
Yuuji stopped short, looking at the ground.  “I—man, it must be jet lag.  I haven’t been able to think straight all day.  I don’t remember Ken being assigned to London.”    
“The bomb scare, do you remember anything about that?”  
“Just security chasing the guy down.” Yuuji looked around.  “This place has changed.”  
“Come,” Krotznic said, pointing, “this way.  We’ll get everything sorted out.” Maybe Kudoh really was disoriented, or maybe it was a scam, but in the long run, he would get the guy back to base to be sorted there.     
“Someone getting the jump on Aya,” Yuuji said thoughtfully.  “That’s a first.”  
“He said he was confused,” Krotznic said carefully.  “Still, it does seem strange.” Unless Fujimiya was as confused at this guy seemed to be.     
*     *     *  
“Christine Gray,” Schuldig said, giving Crawford the mental image he had taken from Krotznic’s mind.  “Engaged to marry Cedric Powell, and unless there are a few of them running around with the same name, one of the contributing financial members of the Grancoster-Wells board of directors.”  
“Hmmm,” Brad hummed.  “What have you gotten on the woman?”  
“Blinded in her late teens from a degenerative cornea disease, old money sliding into gentile poverty, caught herself and started an aroma therapy business.  Most of her clientele, as usual, are the same old money being snobby about combining charity with keeping it among their own, but she does have a degree in chemistry—hmmm, indeed,” he mocked.  “Let me guess; we grab the woman,” he added dully.     
“Stop being sarcastic,” Brad said.     
“Or you will what?  Throw me to KB as well?” the red head gave him a wide eyed look.  
“Why not?” Brad agreed as if he had been serious.  
“You heartless bastard,” Schuldig exclaimed.  “You know I am allergic to geraniums!”  
“We grab the fiancé,” Brad decided, reaching out to press the button on the ignition.     
“Yuuji is not happy with you,” Schuldig threw in.     
Brad smirked.  “He knew what he was getting into.”  
*    *    *  
Sylvia Linn found her erstwhile team mate in a café in Prague.  “You fool!  The council is going to pass an edict on you if you don’t report back today!”  
Sergei Prahanov bleared over his vodka.  “Fuck the council,” he stated and downed the clearer than clear liquid, then picked up the almost empty bottle and poured the last out, giving it a good shake to get the last drops. “That bastard will see us all dead anyway.  Let them come and get me.  It is not their war I am fighting,” he added bitterly.  
“Sergei,” she switched tactics, moving to put her hands on his shoulders.  “Not if we get him first,” she said near his ear.  
He snorted, “Schwarz, the blackest of the Black,” he mockingly toasted with his empty glass, then smacked it down.  “Waiter!  More!” he demanded.  He looked up at her over his own shoulder.  “Amlisch was right.  You are mad.  If you were a man, you would have hitched up your pants, notched your bed post and moved on.  Instead you stew and brew like a witch, thinking you have lost something.”  
“Amlisch was a dinosaur,” she hissed.  “Listen, Sergei, the 6th gen brats, Geisle and Leila, they are to be assigned to a new team leader.  You could be that leader.”  
He burped loudly and winced as the liquor reverb stung his sinuses.  “You’re out of your fucking mind, Woman.  Geisle is a punk, and that little monster Leila should have been put down as defective years ago.  Anyone stuck with them will be sent to some gods forsaken shit hole where their wonderful talents for filling mass graves will be useful.”  
Sylvia wanted to strangle him.  “Let me handle them,” she cooed instead.  “After all, Geisel is just a boy.  And he idolized Berger.  He would want revenge for his hero.”  
“Why?” he asked flatly, snatching the bottle from the waiter and filling the glass on his own.  “Go away!” he ordered the waiter, who stood there with the bill on his tray.     
The man stood there stubbornly.  “You pay the bill now.  That is your third bottle.  I don’t want to have to take it from your wallet when you pass out, or there is a surcharge!”  
Sergei glared at him but dug out his wallet and paid the bill.  “I’d rather not have your grubby hands in my pockets!” he stated.  
The waiter sniffed at him arrogantly and stalked away.     
“Peasants,” Sergei sneered.  He gulped down a few swallows of the potent liquor, then half turned to look up at her again.  “Why should I do this?  Those old bastards are gone, the organization will collapse like Soviet Russia.  Somehow that weakling is at the bottom of everything,” he turned to his glass and bottle again.  “The council backed him because they fear him more than the old shits, but why?” he frowned, squinting at nothing.  “I have more power than him.  You have more power than him.  Every one has more power than him.  What has he got?  Five seconds sight into the future and the blessing of the council.  A half mad telepath and a little boy who can lift pencils with his mind,” he slurred in derision.  
“And Sarazawa,” Sylvia reminded him, moving around to sit down across from him, her arms folded on the little table.  “Something strange has happened.  That earthquake, the Elders being killed, Sarazawa back from the dead—this all started when he showed up again.” She frowned, thinking. “Crawford’s always been sly, but Sarazawa’s a snake.”      
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   


	7. Chapter 7

Tithchap 7   
By the time Schuldig had been assigned to Crawford’s team (essentially to spy on him) he had learned how not to tear a mind apart in a quest for information.  Powell was expendable, but Brad wanted an in depth search for anything, no matter how remote, in connection with the brain implant.  That meant a lot of work.  As for the implant, Schuldig figured you did not just tie something like that up to the meat sack in someone’s skull and expect it to work.  It would be like slapping a human brain in the engine of a car and saying the car was self driving.  The meddler’s final thoughts on the Blue Eyes drug connection had been vague, too vague, their only real connection was through KB and this guy KB was after, so there it was.  His life in a nutshell.  Do the impossible and then write a 20 page report.      
He decided to try taking a page from Virus’ play book and over riding Powell’s stranger perception, making it seem like one of those wierd dream conversations where you are talking about something you would never talk about while awake.    
He had Powell sit down in one of his overly expensive leather clad armchairs and then sat across from him on the matching sofa.  “Well, here goes nothing.  Tell me everything about this Human Interleukin drug.”   
Powell had been having second thoughts about H.I.2 since the girl, Shinjou Kurumi’s parents had been shown up and been brutally killed.  He suspected members of KB he had experimented on had done the job.     
Interesting.  It would not be the first time an organization like this had had turn coats.  Kritiker had been bleeding them out for years.  That was the problem with making desperate people kill for a living.  They went from desperate to cold blooded as their lot did not improve.   
The Doctors Shinjou’s lab assistant had turned up, claiming he had part of the research and  could get the rest if he could get the daughter.  Her blood was key.  H.I.3, the anti-dote to Human Interleukin 2’s horrific side effects.  Powell suspected from what had been said that it was too unstable.  The lab guy certainly was.  Powell saw it as proof that too many people were already too interested in the H.I. drugs.  Too many leaks had occurred because of the Welsh soccer team incident.  He wanted to shut it down, save his own ass, rather than risk prison, as soon as he and Christine were married and his future was secure.  He would throw his company behind her in her aromatherapy work and come out looking like a saint.  He was certain he had buried the connections deep enough, and so he had, come to think of it.  Only relentless vigilantes or a telepath could have untangled this web.      
Schuldig firmly guided him to think about the possibility of an implant in the brain that would enhance any natural abilities, similar to the H.I.  If anything as a scientist he might have seen or heard of something.   
Powell had heard of something.  The research into connecting artificial limbs to neural centers.  But he was not interested then, and even less now.  What he had wanted was genetic alteration at a controlled rate, not added on ‘techno-junk’. He had started Human Interleukin out with research into a cure for congenital defects, inherited diseases, but the drug had had such potential for evolving the human race, he could not leave it alone.   
/So it is possible/ Schuldig thought.  /Who approached you with this?/   
Powell’s mind reeled a bit as he realized this was not his own thinking and paranoid self preservation kicked in.  He was resisting, attempting to wake from the ‘dream’, but in moments, Schuldig had him back under control.   
Powell wasn’t sure of who was backing the person he had spoken to, but the man himself had claimed to be from some military medical organization.  They wanted to know if “Grancoster-Wells current experimental formulas” could work with implants; ostensibly to repair wounded soldiers.  Powell had brushed it off, disturbed that anyone would know anything about what was going on in the labs, but certain Human Interleukin could eventually regrow damaged limbs.   
Schuldig pulled up Powell’s memory of the person who had spoken to him and hit disappointment.  It was a damned phone call, and Powell could not remember the date or time; only the conversation and what the guy had sounded like.   
Schuldig sighed.  He withdrew from Powell’s mind and took out his phone.  Maybe it was time to try an experiment of his own.   
“It’s about time,” Crawford snapped when he answered.   
“Someone has to water those bushes, pathetic things,” Schuldig snickered, locking onto the source of his annoyance.   
“You know how I feel about primitive conditions.”   
“Your dick is over civilized.  You should take it out more; walks in the woods and so forth.”   
“Oh, shut up.  I’ll be up there in a few minutes,” Brad sighed.     
*     *     *   
When he tapped on the front door of the flat, Schuldig let him in and lead the way to a sitting room in the street facing wall of the flat.  Powell was in a deep sleep state, docile in an arm chair, eyes closed.     
“This is so complicated, I am not so sure we can do it,” Schuldig skipped the preliminaries as he stood looking at Powell, his arms crossed.  His eyes found Brad’s.  “But this is what I am thinking.  Not to just show you my view of his memory; I get you into his head, and you use your talent on that memory.  Do you think this can be done?  If so, we have a new advantage, and why not try it out now?”   
Brad wasn’t so sure.  “It’s one thing to link minds but using my talent inside that mind?  If you freak out and leave me in there, then what?”   
“I would not do that,” Schuldig stated.  “No matter what, I would not do that.  I think after everything we have tried and survived, I am willing to try this.  If I connect with your talent and freak out, then I pull us both out.”     
Brad put his hand to his chin, thinking.  99% of talent was mental will.  Schuldig had a point, they had been able to calm each other down in some pretty complicated situations.  And it would be an advantage if it worked.  “You show me his memory of what?”   
“A phone call with a man asking if he thought one of his experimental drugs would aid in military medical research, to connect artificial limbs.  Something triggered his suspicions; he perceived a heavy allusion to the H.I., so he gave the guy the bum’s rush.  It is the only connection I could find.”   
“Sounds harmless when you remove the side effects of this particular drug, doesn’t it?” Brad mused.  “But I’m not getting a sense of military application in this.  I’m certain this is privately funded.  It’s just too quiet.”   
“Powell was too arrogant about his drug to agree to meet this person and discus it any further,” Schuldig waved a hand as if to dismiss the whole thing.  “My premise is what if he had?” he looked at Brad again.     
Brad drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, then let his hand drop to his slacks pocket.  Suddenly, how to run it snapped into place.  “Track this guy down from there,” he focused on Schuldig’s face.     
“Maybe, no?” the red head said optimistically.  “Like Nagi and the computer; you chase, we follow.”  He hoped putting it that way would make it sound more sane.   
“And maybe it was just someone looking to improve medical repairs to veterans,” Brad said grimly.  “Wait a moment.”     
His talent showed him nothing pertinent regarding the future on medical improvements.     
He shook his head.  “Nothing.”   
“You have already pissed on the bushes, don’t piss on my parade,” Schuldig warned.  “Besides, why don’t you just check to see if this experiment of ours will work?”   
“That would be boring,” Brad moved to drag a chair over next to Powell’s still form.  He sat down and arranged himself comfortably.  “Alright, let’s do it,” he said grimly.     
*     *     *   
Yuuji peeled up Aya’s t-shirt and looked over his skinny, muscular torso. “The hell?”  Lurid purple patches marred his ribs on both sides.  “Fight back a little next time, will you?”   
“You sat there and practically gave your blessing on this mission, Mr. No Girls Under 18,” Aya yanked down his t-shirt and crossed his arms sullenly.  “Getting beat up was just part of the job.”   
“Oh, and what happened to Mr. Happy To See Me?” he reached over to yank Aya’s shirt back up to his crossed arms, pulling him closer to him by it.   
Aya grinned and shoved him away, conveniently toward the narrow bed in the small room.  “I know what Mihirogi-san hates you for,” he said coyly.   
“Yeah, so do I,” Yuuji said.  “Can’t be helped,” he met grin for grin.     
Aya took a step and shoved him again.   
Yuuji raised an eyebrow and braced himself, refusing to move.     
Aya smiled sweetly—and in a flash hooked him behind the knee with his ankle and yanked.   
Yuuji threw his balance to his other foot and caught Aya’s arm, keeping himself up and swinging Aya around and down backwards onto the bed, falling on top of him.    
For at least ten minutes, Aya struggled manfully (yeah, really.  No.) to keep his clothes on; but once his boots were off, the rest was fair game.  Yuuji skinned him of his black jeans and tossed them in the corner.  “I am going to spank that smart little ass of yours for making me work so hard,” he threatened.   
Aya turned over and on his elbows, wiggled his butt, daring him.  “Work harder,” he purred.     
“Oh, but what about your report, Agent Fujimiya?” Yuuji teased.     
Aya scowled up at him.  “I reported to that jerk telepath already.”   
Yuuji gave up. “That’s not what I meant, you savage,” he unbuckled his belt.  “I’ve been worried about you.” The bruises continued on his back.  He was going to have a word or two, punctuated with fists, with that damned telepath.   
Aya assumed a bland expression. “Why would you?”   
“This is too much like Tokyo; too much like being back in the same cage,” he kicked off his short boots, stepped out of his slacks, and pulled off his shirt.  Where to start, where to start?  All that Aya, spread out like a banquet for a hungry pervert.  His poor ribs, all black and blue.  Yuuji sat down on the bed to gently run his hand over them, then bent to kiss the worst of the bruises.  “I don’t like it.  Are you in pain?  Don’t lie to me, I know how you hide things.”   
“I ache all over,” Aya groaned, flattening out.  “I took some pain killers, but I think they wore off.  They’ve had me doing the Ikebana thing for the shop, keeping me under foot.  If the place is wired, I didn’t find anything.  At this point I don’t care.”  He turned over and looked up into those hazel green eyes.  “You’re right about this being too much like Tokyo in a twisted nightmare way.  I want to go home.  I hate the people, I hate the stink, I hate the food of all these strange places.  How do you stand it?”   
Yuuji smiled gently.  “Japan is just one little country in a great big world we have to live in.  Maybe because I grew up kind of isolated in a weird way, I wanted to see all of it.  Aya,” he ran a hand up and down a not so bruised thigh.  “Is this going to make things hurt worse?”   
Aya half frowned,  “Sex makes everything good,” he asserted with mock seriousness.     
“For that, I ought to smack your ass after all,” Yuuji grinned and moved to snuggle down onto him.   
Aya stretched, spreading his legs, drawing up his knees and exhaling in bliss at the physical connection.  “How long are we supposed to be here?”    
Yuuji kissed him and ran a hand down his flank to stroke his hip, settling into position.  “No, we can’t stay in bed all the time we are here.”   
“Oh, now you’re a damned telepath,” Aya grumbled and looped his arms around Yuuji’s shoulders.   
*     *     *   
Brad shook his head to clear it.     
“What went wrong?” Schuldig asked aloud, having been unable to read Brad’s mind while he was using his talent.   
“The connection—it’s not real,” Brad took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes as gently as possible.  “In court of law they have a term; hear say. It's inadmissible to attest to what someone else witnessed and described.  Only the original witness can give testimony.  Looks like the timeline follows that rule as well.”  He put his glasses back on.  “Powell had no real contact with the guy so there is no timeline extent to follow.” He sighed heavily.  “We’ll just have to wait and see.  If this is going to affect us at all, even with us being involved, it must be fairly far out, or something will occur to put paid to it before it crosses our path again.”   
Schuldig shook his head.  “You’re saying give up,” he had picked up the fleeting thought now.  “You?”   
“For now,” Brad said with reluctant honesty.     
Schuldig shook his head.  “I don’t like it.”   
“You don’t have to,” Brad took him by the shoulder and turned him toward the door.  “But I suggest you learn to accept that some things are going to be a pain in the ass.  You can’t always have your way.”    
“Wait, what about…” Schuldig half turned, but Brad already had his gun out and shot Powell in the forehead, the sound echoing in the high ceilinged flat.  The body slumped back, a trickle of blood beginning to run down the side of it’s nose into it’s collar as the heart muscle caught up with the now extinguished brain.     
Schuldig huffed in annoyance and turned to follow Brad into the hallway to the front door.  “What now?”   
“There are three members of the Kripton Brand team to run down before they are captured and someone does something about their blood work,” Crawford lead the way to the stairs, not the elevator.  “Now, we get the woman.  They’ll go for her when they find out we’ve yanked Powell out from under them.”   
“Yay,” Schuidig said with mock enthusiasm.  “Alive or dead?”   
“Bait always works better when it’s bleating,” Brad said in that tone that meant Schuldig was having a ‘stupid moment’.   
The german sighed shortly.  “What ever.”   
*     *     *   
Tot wondered into the shop as casually as possible to find Aya working on a hanging planter.  Moss wrapped in brown wire formed the planter itself, the soil trapped inside.  It was quite messy, but a customer, spured by the true Ikebana displays, had asked about Kokudama and as usual, Ken had no clue.     
“So?” Aya asked simply after a few minutes.  He wasn’t sure what creeped him out about her ‘normal’ look, but it was too much for his nerves.     
“Aya-kun,” she said quietly, “Is Hidaka-san sane?”   
Startled, he looked at her with wide eyes through his fringe, then set the wire cutters down, shaking the hair out of his eyes.  “Probably not.”   
“Ah,” she said.  Then looked around, smelling flowers and poking at the arrangements on display.  “Kurumi-chan’s parents were killed by KB.”   
He glanced at her.   “Should we be discussing this?”    
She frowned.  “I can’t remember who killed my Papa, and Helle-neh-chan and the others, and but I know someone did.”   
Oh-oh, Aya thought.  “Strange how we are all orphans in this business, isn’t it?”   
She looked up at him.  “Who killed your parents?”   
Aya froze his face.  “Takatori (which one) ordered them killed.  He framed my father for bank fraud when he refused to go along with being blackmailed any further.”   
She blinked. “Oh,”she said, blushing a little.     
“Not all the Takatori family were philanthropic,” he poked at the kokudama some more, making certain the plants were secure in their setting.  When held up, it looked rather like an over sized mistletoe ball of ferns and decoratively leafed vines.  A bit of the misty forest to decorate a home or office.  He decided he liked them better than the floral excesses he had been forced to make far too many times for hotels and restaurants.     
Tot touched a hanging leaf gently, something going on behind her eyes.  “People do things for strange reasons, don’t they?”  She looked up at him.     
“Well—yes,” he said.  “And some of them have to be made to stop.”   
She grinned.  “And that’s the fun part!”  In that moment, Tot was Tot again.  Then she pulled herself together, giving him a wicked wink before becoming the shy model again and left through the door she had come in by.    
Aya felt his heart starting again. If she remembered what had happened before, he would have more than KB on his back.  Or had his ‘luck’ just saved him yet again?     
There was no telling.  He had to find Yuuji and let him know.      
 


	8. Eight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tablet does not like AO3s formatting, it loses all my italics and emphasis in copy paste, so sorry about the mess it makes. The screen lags and reformatting the whole thing takes hours. 
> 
> Second, is it just my access to online transcripts or does the cut mouth trident guy in the scene where he attacks Lord Cripton in Weiss B Side not ever named? I mean they have Jack and Crown, but this guy has no name. My manga are boxed and burried so I can't get to them myself. Any help appreciated.

 

  
Christine Gray was working at her desk when the double doors to her living room / office opened and two men entered un-announced by her secretary, Anne.  Both walked with a light step, and a body solidity; the carriage of athletes, cops or soldiers.  “I wasn’t expecting anyone,” she said tentatively.  “Did you gentlemen have an appointment?” she said, reaching cautiously for her cell phone.  
A sudden step and closer presence at her side startled her and the phone was neatly slid out from under her fingers.  “None of that Frau Gray,” a voice between a lilt and a growl said far too close to her sensitive ears.  “Your secretary has been sent home for the day.  “Allow me to be the first to commiserate with you; your fiancé has been murdered, and we are taking you into protective custody.”  
“W-what?  Cedric?” she faltered, knocked out of her world.  “Anne?  Anne!  Where is Anne?”  She tried to rise from her chair.  
Hands caught her by the upper arms and firmly lead her around it.  “Anne has gone home for the day,” said the man too close to her.  His fingers were strong, but he did not hurt her, only made it clear she was not going to get away easily.  “Where do you want her?” Schuldig had set the secretary outside the front door with orders to go home firmly locked in her mind.  
“The kitchen will do,” Brad said, and she identified him as ‘the one with the dark, scary voice’.     
 “What’s happened to Cedric—why are you doing this!” Christine protested, struggling feebly.     
Schuldig found her very weak, her muscles soft as butter, her bones thin.  Obviously she had missed the whole work out craze for skinny women who wanted to be Laura Croft this decade.  “He is dead.” He walked her down a hallway to a kitchen.  There was a work table and set her on one of the two chairs, shoving it in to prop her up and standing behind her to keep her trapped against the table. “Shot in the head. Now don’t fret, there was no pain, instantaneous lights out.  Now you must focus on keeping you alive, so don’t be a total pill.”    
“Schuldig,” Brad admonished mildly, giving Christine a name for one of them.  
“She is like spaghetti,” Schuldig complained. “No bones, no muscle, nothing.  A wet noodle, and over cooked at that.  Seriously, I am concerned for the race with this sort of thing going on.  If the upper class can not keep itself in shape for the next class war, what is the point?”  
“Never mind that,” Brad pulled out a chair and sat down across from her.  “There is a jar of crap instant coffee you will be making.  So, Ms. Gray, we are here to keep you from being murdered next.”  
Pale sightless eyes blinked, then tears welled.  “Cedric’s—dead?”  
“Oh, don’t start,” Schuldig rummaged in the cupboard, pushing odd packets of scary sounding things out of the way (Did they really make tea from Bulls? And ‘fishpaste`?  Really?  Fish. Paste?) “Have a little sense of self-preservation here.  After all, you have a perfectly good back up man in the waiting, with no unsavory habits of making humanity altering poisons.  This Edward Krotznic, he is a nice enough fellow, no?  No facial surgery to make his nose smaller and thin like that Powell guy,” he gestured at his face, forgetting she was blind.  “That could have been a nasty shocker if you had had kids and they inherited that trunk.”  
She turned toward his voice, gaping for words, shocked even further.     
“Schuldig,” Brad said dully.  “Stop trying to jolly her up.  Better yet, make a gallon of tea as well.  That usually fixes anything British.”     
*     *     *  
“We might have a big problem,” Aya found Yuuji in what passed for this flower shop’s version of the basement meeting room. It was larger and a pillar supported the first floor beam in a rather awkward place.  “You’ve been busy.” Yuuji was at the computer, opening file after file, scanning the first page, then closing them.    
“Someone has to get us out of here before I go nuts,” Yuuji said grimly, saving a file to a flash drive he had plugged in.     
“Tot is having issues with Ken,” Aya informed him.  “Did they fix her brain for all of us, or just you and I?”    
“Knowing Brad, he had Schuldig clear her memory of all of us the second time. And who doesn’t have issues with Ken?” Yuuji opened another file.  “These ex-A Side guys—and who the hell though up that stupid name?—we have their files from Krypton Brand, but that gives us nothing post-H.I. injections. Mihirogi said they were experimented on.  Free was the only one to escape after he had been injected once.  Developing super human strength probably being a factor in his escape.  Krotznic wasn’t given any from what I can find.”  
“If Tot is here to get to Shinjou Kurumi, why?” Aya asked, crossing his arms.     
“Getting to that…” Yuuji scanned the report on the screen. “Shit,” he stated.     
Aya put a hand on his shoulder and leaned over to read, then realized it was in English.  “What does it say?”  
Yuuji translated the main information on the girl and her parents for him.  
Aya’s dismay showed, a bone tired sadness on his even featured face. “Every time I ask why would anyone do such a horrific thing, someone else comes along and does something more so.”     
“I can see experimenting on criminals condemned to death row, that’s one thing, but adopting little babies just to have guinea pigs?” Yuuji growled, reading on through the report.  “Oh, nice, they let Ken do the wet work.  He would, knowing they had killed children.  Just great, that’s got to have added to his psychosis.”     
“That must be it,” Aya said.  “He seems so much more brittle now.  I think he’s out optimist-ing Tsukiono.”  
Yuuji ejected the flash drive and pocketed it, then ran a system clean to reset the computer back to the previous hour he had done a save/restore point at. “We’d better get back up to the shop,” he stood up.  “I haven’t been here long enough to have my hypnotic suggestions last more than 30 minutes.  Yuki’s bound to wonder why the hell he came in here in the first place and logged onto  the computer.”    
Aya followed him out of the room.  “You’re not going to kill everyone, are you?” he asked quietly.    
Yuuji turned in the stairwell to look at him.  “If it comes down to a fight, yes.  If not, we just walk away. No big newsy splash.  We’re covert, remember?”  
“But—they’ll know it was us,” Aya protested in a hiss just in case anyone was coming.  
“Us what?” Yuuji said innocently, patting his pocket.  “I didn’t take anything they’ll know we’ll use.  Those files weren’t all that important to anyone but them and us.  Nothing indicating any knowledge of our meddler.  Just who, what, where, when stuff.  Nice to know for later.  Naoe could have hacked it.  But I want to know what I’m up against now.”  
“I suppose you got into my files when they put me in Weiss, too,” Aya grouched.    
“Nope,” Yuuji said.  “You were such a pathetic little hard case anyone could see why you were nuts.  Psychopathic rapist.”  
Aya’s face went blank then angry.  He punched Yuuji in the thigh.  “That was a one time thing!”  
“Ow!  See what I mean?” Yuuji complained, rubbing his injured limb.  “Rape is rape, you savage.”  
“And you enjoyed it,” Aya said archly and stalked past him up the stairs.  
“You need to stop reading your sister’s mangas,” Yuuji grumbled, following him.     
      *     *     *  
Schuldig came back to Lady Gray’s flat, locking the front door behind him and finding his way back to the kitchen. “You’re sure this will do it?” He had gone to find a working pay phone with a non-working CCTV camera on it to anonymously alert the police.  Quite a hike, even with a precog to point the way.     
Brad half scowled over the now tepid instant coffee he had been sipping.  “When it hits the news that Cedric Powell has been found dead in his flat, they will want their revenge on Ms. Gray here.”  
Lady Gray had finally ceased sobbing into her tea and was gloomily sipping her third cup.  “You’re not police.  You haven’t identified yourselves. You’re holding me hostage for some reason, aren’t you?” She was drained of emotion, her voice flat.     
“She wins the prize.  If I had a box of comfits, I would give you one,” Schuldig said.  “Sadly, I lost them in the pool of tears.  Are you quite settled into being helplessly miserable?”  
“Make yourself some coffee,” Brad said.  “It’s going to be a long evening.” He looked at Christine. “Aromatherapy.  How does that relate to reality?”  
She drew a shaky breath.  “The sense of smell is the strongest attachment to emotion.  It’s not just perfume. Many common scents can be used in psycho-therapy, to help bring out repressed memories so that they can be dealt with.”  
“How would you know what smell to use in the first place if the memory is repressed?” Brad asked, his doubt obvious.     
She swallowed hard, sniffling.  “If the patient reveals something, like a house fire, or being locked in a closet, or something where a scent would obviously be deduced, it could be guessed at.”  
“White roses, why white?  Don’t roses all smell the same?” Shculdig asked.  He filled the kettle again and turned on the stove, then left the room.    
She grew very still for a moment, then spoke hesitantly.  “There is a slight tang to white roses; it’s hard to describe to someone who isn’t more aligned with scent rather than vision, but there is a faint hint of pineapple or fresh cream to certain varieties of white rose.”  
“And what does it remind you of?” Brad asked ever so lightly, knowing the answer because Schuldig had already told him.     
She tipped her head down, the cup of tea cosseted between her hands.  “That’s a very personal question,” she said quietly, her voice trembling.  
“Krotznic is a very attractive man,” Brad smirked and she heard the undertone of humor in his voice.  “Much more dramatic than Powell.  Bit too Slavic for my tastes, but he wouldn’t destroy a fashion layout.  Then again, he’s also just a foreign war orphan and a poor florist, barely working class.  Not much to offer there for someone accustomed to your lifestyle.”    
“That’s not--!” she half stood, angry and defensive, then fell back again, her hands on her face.  Suddenly she lashed out, sweeping the tea cup and saucer onto the floor with a crash of porcelain.  “That’s not true!  What you’re accusing me of!  How could you know!  How could you know anything!” she demanded helplessly, her hands fists on the table top.  “Edward has nothing to do with this, nothing.  He’s an old friend, that’s all!”  
Brad decided he was bored beyond even faking a conversation and did not reply.  His dirty work was done.     
Schuldig came back in and slapped a box of facial tissues down on the table.  “I leave you alone with a woman two minutes and you reduce her to damned near suicide,” he commented.     
“Coffee,” was all Brad said, taking out his phone and opening the browser.     
Schuldig looked at the mess on the floor. “Am I supposed to clean this up, too?”  
“You know, I am not inclined to be nice.  Instant coffee does not equate with hospitality in my book and I see no need to pay for it with light house keeping.”  
/She can’t see you giving her that evil glare of yours.\  Schuldig reminded him.     
Brad stuck his tongue out at her and waggled his fingers near his ear just to be absolutely politically incorrect.  /Does she know what Powell has been up to?  She seems very attached to him, and after all, they are both chemists.\  
Schuldig checked, slinking in through her jumbled thoughts and letting her worries of Powell lead her to thinking about why he might have been killed.     
She knew some of it.  She knew he was attempting to find a way to help people with his Human Interleukin project, but not the dirty, dark side effects.  Powell had not told her yet that as soon as he had her fortune in the bag, he would have shut down the whole thing and lived the easy life, run for parliament and all that. /Poor girl doesn’t even realize she’s got it badder than bad for Krotznic.  Total denial.  She will thank us later.\     
/Stop the crap,\ Brad ordered.  
/Ah, come on, why not?\  
/Because we are evil bastards and it’s none of our business.  Plus, you would make a shitty cupid.\  
/And Krotznic would quit KB and they would loose their comparatively smartest soldier.\ Schuldig grinned at him wickedly.     
/You see this happening, do you?\    
/Why can’t I make a few predictions now and then?\  
/When I take up mind reading, you can.\ Brad thought snidely.  
/Now you are just being pissed off,\ the telepath retorted.     
The kettle shrilled, and with a mealy face for Crawford, Schuldig turned back to the counter to make them both a cup of the ersatz crap from a jar.  
“What are you going to do to me?” Christine asked dully, her hands restless on the bare table top.     
“Some of your fiancés victims are going to be very angry when they find out he’s no longer at their mercy,” Brad sipped the instant coffee and made a face, but then looked resolved to it.  “That makes you a target.”  
“Victims?” she exclaimed. “I don’t know anything about his research, but Cedric would never intentionally harm anyone! He only talked about how it was going to be helping people who had been badly injured, save them from years of reconstructive surgery and transplants.  It was all too much for me.  I’m a chemist, not an expert in human bio-chemistry.”  She felt for and found the box of tissues, blowing her nose carefully and taking another to wipe her face.  “Am I supposed to just sit here and do nothing, or can I clean myself up?”  
Brad checked the future.  “Schuldig will go with you to freshen up.” /She’s game enough to try and make a run for it, so keep an eye on her.  And watch out for any perfume or sprays she has in the bathroom.\  
/I caught that.  Tricky little baggage.  It would have just irritated anyone with real intent.\  
“We don’t intend to harm you in any way,” Brad told her as Schuldig caught her arm and lifted her to her feet from the chair.  “On the contrary, we will be saving your life. But if you make a fuss, we will tie you up and gag you.”    
*     *     *  
Yuuji scowled at the flowers.  Once upon a time he had had no quarrel with them, but after Weiss, he found he couldn’t so much as look at a dandelion without having to repress a sneer.   He opted for answering the phone and working the cash register.  “This blows.  I know it’s a good cover and a delivery van and a bouquet will get in you in most anywhere, but it blows.”  
Aya shot him a look over the arrangement he was working on.  “I suppose the whole point is that no matter how ugly the world gets, we are supposed to be reminded of the beauty, or some shit like that.”  
“Or the mercenary assholes just figure the fees from the funeral flowers will cover the expense of killing the guy in the first place.”  
Aya straightened out a leaning snap dragon thoughtfully.  “You sound like Kudoh again.”  
“It’s getting on my nerves.  I swear, I am going to go buy a pack of cigarettes.”  
“No, you will not,” Aya set the arrangement on the ready for delivery shelf.  “Even if we weren’t under house arrest to keep us from being re-captured by Esset.” He went behind the counter and grabbed the blond, giving him the tongue sucking of his life. When he broke it off, he looked into Yuuji’s eyes.  “Better?”  
Yuuji wondered if he needed a physical check up, because that had left him decidedly dizzy.  “Oh, much,” he said, holding onto the counter.     
“What are we doing here?  Did he put us here just to get us out of the way?  Torture us?”    
“Shhh!” Yuuji warned.  “That voice of yours can go through walls.  We collect the data, check for any sign of them knowing anything about the guy with the thing in his head and sit still and wait for orders.  Covert, Aya, means covert.”     
Aya crossed his arms and looked annoyed again.  “He’s torturing us because he’s a sadist and he knows exactly how I hate this situation because that telepath told him, and he hates me.”  
“Yes, Aya, it’s all about you,” Yuuji told him seriously.  “This entire mess, right from the beginning has been all about you.  You are  the center of the universe and Fate is just messing with that silly colored head of yours for the pure fuckery of it.”  
Aya glared at him.  “Did you find anything about the guy with the thing in his head?”  
“Not a drop of digital ink.  They are all about Blue Eyes and Human Interleukin, some other scams and terrorist threats and that’s about it.  Nothing like what we ran into.” He looked out through the plants in the bow window, not really seeing anything more than the daylight out there, thinking.  “The guy himself was thinking Blue Eyes and Esset, and KB, according to Schuldig.”  
“Maybe he got it wrong,” Aya leaned his still crossed arms on the counter and his shoulder against Yuuji’s.     
“He wouldn’t dare,” Yuuji asserted. “Esset trains full responsibility, and if he had any question about the data, he would have said so.  There has to be a connection with Grancoster-Wells.”  
Aya was silent for a while.     
The roar of a motorcycle alerted them to Ken’s return.  He came in pulling off his helmet.  "Have I got time for a break before the next orders go out?”  
Yuuji checked the list. “Krotznic took the hotel orders.  You’ve got 45 minutes for lunch at this rate.”  
“Are you allowing for the traffic here in London?” Ken asked, rubbing his hand over his scalp to un-flatten his hair.     
“You’ve got a motorcycle.  Drive on the sidewalk,” Yuuji said.     
Ken came over to the counter to look at them both searchingly in turn.  “You guys, you really don’t remember anything about what Esset had you doing?”  
Yuuji gave him an arched brow.  “Lots of plane time, being moved in and out of vehicles, waking up in strange places. What ever they had us for, the bomb threat at the airport tossed a wrench in their gears.”  
“It’s just weird they haven’t shown up to do anything about it.  Omi thinks they are the ones who blew up his Grandfather’s place.”  
“I want my katana back,” Aya said.  “Maybe I’ll do something about it myself.  Go stand in the street and call them out.”  
“Not hap-pen-ning,” Yuuji said lightly in a sing-song voice.  “No more crazy off on your own stuff, Aya.  I have an investment in keeping your body in one piece, remember?”  
“Eugh, gay,” Ken winced.  “Come on, Kudoh, don’t start that crap in public again.  Keep it to yourselves.  What ever happened to stuffing everything in the closet?” he complained.     
“It got boring.  You can only get into so many positions in a closet, especially the small ones,” Aya informed him cooly.     
“I hear a sandwich calling, lalalalala, can’t hear you over the noise,” Ken evacuated the disaster zone.     
Yuuji looked at Aya.  “That sounded pretty gay, didn’t it?”  
“He got the whole lalalalal thing down, didn’t he?  I think I’m going to be ill.”  
“Screw this.” Yuuji picked up the phone and punched in a number.     
*     *     *  
Brad sighed and took out his phone, not even bothering to look at it.  “Is this what you call being under cover?”  
“This is not what you set me up for,” Yuuji growled.    
“We’re in the middle of a hostage situation here,” Brad warned.     
“Did you remember the duct tape?”  
Brad took off his glasses, closed his eyes and rubbed his temple.  “Actually we don’t need any, the woman is blind and physically fragile.  What the hell are you up to?” He put his glasses back on and focused on smacking this down right now.     
“Nothing,” Yuuji complained.  “A big fat nothing.  Tell me again why we are here?”    
“You’re there to rescue Fujimiya.  I assume he has been rescued?” Brad chuckled.  
“No, we are now both trapped by a very suspicious Krypton Brand agent and a bunch of plants, and I don’t like the way the plants are looking at me.  Seriously, Brad, one more damned floral arrangement and I will fire bomb London.” He said angrily.    
“What, even Big Ben?” Brad taunted.  
“Even Big Ben,” Yuuji asserted.  “Houses of Parliament like dominos.  Gone.”  
“Barbarian.  Did you find anything useful?”  
“Three ex members M.I.A. and one current of Krypton Brand have been injected with H.I.2.”  
“Old news,” Brad said mercilessly. “We’re waiting on them right now.  It should hit the news soon that Cedric Powell was found shot dead in his London flat hours ago by person or persons unknown.  Those three will have a fit and come after his bereaved fiancé to find out if anyone got anything out of the bastard. Schuldig and I will kill them.”  
“Ah, well, exciting time for you.  But what about us?”    
Brad thought about it, “I supposed you and Fujimiya could do something drastic around about 5 pm.  But you would be burning your bridges with law enforcement.  Interpol would have your faces all over the board.”  
Yuuji swore violently.  “What. The. Fuck. Brad?”  
“Not to worry, I have a plan that will cover your asses quite adequately.  You could work in the kitchen at Rosencruz until retirement.”  
“You set us up, you rotten no good sadist.”  
“On the contrary,  I put you where you could glean as much as possible from Interpol’s data bases without wasting hours of time on the project.  Someone supposedly military contacted Powell about using his drug to enhance prosthetics.  Powell told them to get lost, but they must have gotten their information somewhere.  Too bad his memory was so vague, but it is a connection.”  
“Alright!  Fine!” Yuuji hit the button and smacked the phone back into the holder.  “Hold the front down, I’m going to get back into that computer.”  
“What’s up?” Aya asked.     
“He wants the Interpol Data base searched without triggering the people who we’re searching for.  Now it makes sense. This way it’s just business as usual.  KB looking for something someone mentioned in regard to H.I.  He’s been working with Schuldig so long he forgets the rest of us can’t read his damned devious mind!” he grumbled his way out of the shop, setting the bead curtain rattling.  
“Ah,” Aya said, and slumped with his chin in his hand, prepared to be bored.  
   
 


	9. Nine

Chapter 9     
A phone rang in the quiet of the kitchen.  Schuldig dug it out of his pocket.  He looked to Crawford, who nodded.  Schuldig held the phone over to the blind woman with one hand and his gun to her nose with the other.  “You smell that?  That is a gun, and all the other smells that go with getting shot pointed at your head.  Think about your life before you say anything.  Now answer it.”   
She hesitated, then trembling, took her phone from his hand.  She knew from the ring who it was.  “Edward,” she said, “you got my letter?” Her eyes watered again as she thought of the mood she had been in when she wrote that letter.  Half joy, half sad, hoping he would understand, hoping she would understand herself eventually.     
“Christine—when was the last time you heard from Powell?” his voice was cautious, hesitant.   
Schuldig bopped her lightly on the tip of her nose with the end of the gun.     
“This morning,” she said as neutrally as possible.  “Why?”   
“You haven’t heard?” he stated.   
Schuldig put his finger over her lips.   
“Christine, I have some very bad news.  The police just found your fiancé in his flat.  He’s been shot—he’s dead.” Edward said gently in her ear.  “They don’t know who did it yet.”   
She wanted to cling to his voice like a lifeline, but the man with the gun kept his finger pressed firmly over her lips.     
Schuldig took the phone now and slowly set it down on the table, then pressed the end call button.  “Nicely done,” he said, smiling.  “I give him fifteen minutes to get here.”   
“Seventeen,” Brad said in his know-it-all voice, looking at Christine.  “Tie her up and put her in the bedroom closet.  We don’t need her rolling around loose during the fight.”   
“What fight?” she exclaimed shrilly.  “You’re not going to kill Edward, too!”    
“Schuldig, tape,” Brad said and went back to searching the international news on his phone.    
Christine heard a deep sigh, and the hands grasped her upper arms again, pulling her to her feet.  “Come along Frau Gray, you will be nice and cozy in the closet, I am sure.  We told you, the men your ex-fiancé  experimented on with his gene altering drugs will be coming shortly to cause all kinds of havoc.  You don’t want to end up dead, you stay very quiet.” He lead her clumsily around the chair to take her to the bedroom, hurrying her along.     
    *     *     *   
Yuuji worked like a mad man at the computer.     
Yuki had been surprised as hell when the big blond smeared something wet across his mouth and nose with the palm of his hand, but then everything made sense after ‘Kudoh’ told him to sit down and be quiet.  He sat on one of the battered arm chairs and a blanket of calm settled over him (as he had been informed would by that voice.)   
“You resting comfortable there, Yuki-kun?” Yuuji asked, the stress that showed on his face not evident in his voice. His voice was soothing, companionable—hypnotic.     
“Yes,” Yuki sounded a bit surprised.  “Um—what are we doing again?”   
“Playing an online game,” Yuuji lied blithely.  Well, sort of.  He was going through the data bases like crazy, setting one screen for one search at a time and running about five simultaneously.  The computer had enough power to take that many, but the net was slow in some cases, the Interpol one being heavily loaded most of the time.     
He tried everything he could think of.  Medical break throughs in transplants, implants for hereditary disease like Parkinson’s, anything that would allow something electronic to be placed in the brain and used to enhance the minds ability to control anything.  Shunts and hormone dose devices popped up in the medical search, but nothing that would account for a mild case of telepathy caused by something stuck in the brain.  Unless—the person already had that possibility and something had worked otherwise.     
He went with a name that kept popping up the last three times he tried a new variation on the search.     
Galea Medical Group.     
A non-profit working for hereditary diseases control, based in the UK, according to their mission statement.  They worked with bio-regulatory implants.     
He checked them against Interpol.     
Nothing.     
But something just bothered him about it.  Every big medical concern had publicity, good or bad, especially if they rushed to push their new drugs on the market.  He tried more searching.  Lancet, AMA, etc.     
Nothing came up.     
How could a medical group not have connections, publications, research reports, big industry doctors names, a board of directors, investors, donations; stuff that made it legit in the eyes of the industry?   
Yet there was nothing else about this Galea group.  “Yuki-kun, have you ever heard of Galea Medical Group in all the time you have been working on Blue Eyes and Grancoster-Wells?”   
“Gah-lee-ah?” Yuki said thoughtfully.  His mind was a bit hazy at the moment as to why this was so important, but he knew it was.  “No.”   
“Hmm,” Yuuji noised. “Let’s check the military.”  He closed the other windows and opened a new one.     
He knew the back way into pretty much every one of the military data bases in Europe, Asia and America; any of them that actually mattered.  All you needed was a fake identity and a code, and he had been pretty fast at making sure he had that tool in his little spy kit before he’d even graduated.  Military intelligence officers were a dime a dozen and every last one of them susceptible to flattery and his ‘low grade talent’ (he smirked at that constant reminder in his memory.)   
The term ‘Galea’ did not show up as a medical organization.  It showed up as an adjunct think tank connected to MOSSAD and the UK and USA, specifically NASA military research projects.  They had started out with implants intended to regulate human beings in space; to make up for long term disturbances in normal function while in weightless environments or under gravitation differences, higher, lower—all having impact on the human glands. So, their research cover was working with the hereditary diseases of inbred populations of certain religious groups, Amish and Hassidic Jews top of the list.     
“Hmm, again,” Yuuji hit save.  “Yuki, just in case, you had better go through this and erase everything.  We don’t want these people back tracking our research or maybe sending a little retaliatory virus,” he stood up, shifting the hip band on his rather snug slacks.     
“Did you find it?  Galea?” the youth looked up at him trustingly.     
“I found enough to know where to really look for them now,” he headed for the stairs.  If they found Yuki clearing the search, there would be no question.  “And Yuki…”   
Yuki half turned, now seated before the computer.    
“Forget you helped me, this is just a routine clean up.”   
“Yes,” Yuki said.  “A routine clean up.”  He tried not to be too smug about it.  After all, they still had to locate this Galea group, and it looked like there might be more than the usual difficulty involved if they had real military ties.     
   *    *    *   
Tot kept her assignment in mind every waking minute.  Her wide eyed enthusiasm encouraged Kurumi to talk to her.  She felt sorry for the girl, being so far from home.  Tot was not happy about England.  It was an island, but it smelled funny.  The only thing that kept her sane was the big pay off Crawford-san had promised her.     
Nagi would take her to a full cream tea!   
The thought of it almost made her squeal in rapture in the middle of Kurumi’s talking about her feelings for her late parents.  She quickly schooled herself into composure and nodded with a sympathetic face.     
Actually, she was rather interested in the experiments that had been performed.  But she had to keep her knowledge of chemicals and procedures hidden.  What she did do was say things like “how long were you ill?”  “Did they give you anything to relieve the pain?”  “It must have been awful.” While she longed to ask more specific questions.  The more information she could get the more Crawford-san would be less un-happy with her.  It was so important to Nagi-kun to keep Crawford-san happy.     
When Nagi had told her what Crawford had done for him, she had started to see just a little behind the façade of angry control freak.  A lot of that control was aimed at himself.     
Nagi was proud of being on his team, learning from him not through direct teaching, but by being given free reign and trusted to do what he was told.  Nagi was learning that same self control—and with his power, what they called ‘talent’, that was very important.  If Nagi ever lost his temper, it would be like setting off another atom bomb.     
Kurumi-chan finished her story and Tot reached over to lay a hand on her arm and give her a brave smile.  “But you’re here now.  And someday soon, we will both go home to Japan, neh?”   
*    *    *   
Krotznic showed up at the door about ten minutes before Brad saw the other three arrive.     
Schuldig whipped it open just as his hand was nearing the bell button.  “Welcome!  We were just about to start the party,” he grabbed the fair man by the breadth of his forehead and yanked.     
Krotznic, AKA Chloe of all the silly names, fell forward with a case of nauseating vertigo induced by a telepath with a bad sense of humor.  Schuldig caught him and kept him stumbling along down the hall and into the bedroom, where he chucked him into the walk in closet with his lady love.  He pointed to Christine.  “She will explain.  Don’t interfere where you are not needed, KB,” he warned.     
“Edward!” Christine grappled him, trying to sort out where to hold onto him in her blindness.   
He was still very dizzy and near tossing his lunch, but managed to gather himself up enough to embrace her.  “What the hell is going on!  Who killed Powell!” he demanded of the red headed fiend who was just shutting the door.     
Schuldig paused.  “I gave you a chance to keep each other company,” he complained.  “Now you take a nap.”     
The both of them blacked out.     
He shut the door with a firm smack and patted it.  “Civilians, always in the damned way.” He went out to the living room.    
“You really should just give up being nice.” Brad was checking his ammo clips again.  That meant this was going to take a shit load of bullets, Schuldig instantly realized.      
“Just because you have a screw loose doesn’t mean the rest of us are anti-social psychopaths,” Schuldig looked around the room.  “Are we supposed to hide behind the furniture.  Some good solid stuff here.” He patted the antique wooden desk.     
“Just smack them in the brains when they arrive and put a few holes in soft flesh.  I want to question them before we dispose of them.”   
Schuldig chuckled.  “I like that; smack them in the brains.  Do you have any idea of how that smarts?” he half threatened with a grin.   
“Don’t you ever try it,” Brad looked over at him, and braced his weapon arm, aiming at the french windows.  “Ten.”   
Schuldig took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then started feeling for the minds of the ex-KB agents.     
They were chaotic, one stood out with constant pain, his nerve ends fried.  Schuldig left them alone, simply tracking their surface thoughts, as they planned then executed their entry of the flat.     
As the one who called himself Jack came through the french doors of the balcony, Brad’s gun went off in four sharp reports.  Jack did not fall but stood there in initial shock, then let a blade slide out of his sleeve.  Brad shot it out of his hand before he could throw it.     
Schuldig put him down for a nap since the bullets in his upper arms and thighs only slowed him down.  Then he attended to the front door as the one with the nasty cross between a trident and a halberd barged in.  He ducked his tummy to one side to avoid loosing his liver and did as instructed. Smacked the guy on the brain.  He went down like someone had cut his strings.     
That left the burning one.  Crown, who was scrambling up the back, where another balconied window lead to the bedroom.  He had something more than just questioning the woman in mind, too, the nasty bastard. “Flip a coin?” Schuldig asked as Brad joined him in the hallway.    
“Let him get to the middle of the room, then take him down,” Brad ordered calmly.  “They are all physically resistant to pain, I doubt the one I shot even felt more than a faint pressure.”   
“Their nerves are shot to hell,” Schuldig informed him.  “The drug, it destroys them.  Far from being a miracle cure, I would say.  These are not supermen, but walking dead.”   
Brad snorted mildly, tucking his gun away.  “Breeding and breeding alone will save the human race, let alone improve it.”   
Schuldig put Crown down on the carpet, twitching and unable to understand why he was paralyzed from the neck down.  He looked up as the two men walked into the room and stood looking down at him.     
“Some sort of nerve gas?” he asked.   
“No,” Brad said, taking a seat in an arm chair near the window.  “Improved genetics.  All that strength and stamina is nothing against a telepath who can just turn it all off with the flick of a thought.  What were you planning on doing with Powell?”   
Crown blinked.  He had been thinking to play for time until what ever it was wore off.     
Crawford just sat there, looking smugly down at him.  “Your companions are just as helpless.  You might as well sing your little swan song.”   
“It isn’t much, believe me,” Schuldig said, crossing his arms and looking down to put his foot on Crown’s half turned hip.  “Some people have horrible things happen to them and the mind goes snap.  Revenge for the pain is all this one wants.  There is nothing in there worth our while.  The other two are just the usual thugs, nothing about anything Powell was doing interested them.  They just wanted to make a big splash of killing him because this resented the man’s good fortune.”   
Crawford looked at his watch.  Sometimes he just had to make sure he was in the right time.  He sighed.  “Finish them.  But Schuldig, let this one go slow, so the pain goes away first.” He looked kindly down at Crown.   
“Gott, you’re horrible,” Schuldig muttered and obeyed.  He got the hell out of Crown’s head before the man’s true torture began.     
“You’re too soft, Schuldig,” Crawford stood again.  “We’ll get nothing from the others.  Let’s get back to the hotel.  I don’t think I’ve spent such a boring afternoon since Takatori.”   
“This is true,” Schuldig said.  “But I am not soft, just sympathetic, there is a difference.  There is empathy and romance as well, neither one of which I am afflicted with, as you well know,” he added smugly.   
“No romance?” Brad queried archly.  “Then what about those two in the closet?”    
“I told you,” the German growled.  “He will leave KB for her.”   
“But that has nothing to do with you and your silly convictions, right?” Brad walked by him and patted his cheek.  “I need a decent meal and a drink.”   
“What about the others?”   
“We’ll leave them there until morning.”   
“How cruel,” Schuldig giggled, turning the lock and shutting the front door of the flat.  “You know you’re driving them nuts.  Well, all but Tot, who is…” he looped his finger in the air beside his ear.     
“Aren’t we all,” was Brad’s dryly expressed opinion.  “However, Sarazawa is onto something.  There’s been a shift.  Subtle, but there.”   
Schuldig looked elated.  “Then we can go home soon.”   
“Home?” Brad looked at him, an eyebrow raised slightly.   
Schuldig frowned slightly.  “You know what I mean.”   
“Is going back to Japan so important to you?”   
“Where do you want to go?” Schuldig asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer, though he knew he would go anywhere with this man.  Still—it would not be the same somehow, and that would matter eventually.     
Brad leaned over and kissed him lightly on the lips in the empty hallway.  “Japan, then.”   
*    *    *     
Yuuji flopped down on the bed.  “You know, I never realized before how much Ken got on my nerves.  He’s in the kitchen singing hymns for gods sake.”   
Aya laughed softly folding a clean t-shirt to put it on the stack on the dresser.  “I think that’s the point with him.  Maybe you were too drunk or hung over most of the time to notice.  You found something, I can tell.  You body language gives you away.”   
“Yes, I have. Prime suspect, Galea Medical Group.  Specializing in medical implants designed to regulate hormones and so forth, working with the space programs to keep things working in changing gravities.  Most of the implants out there are just simple muscle stimulants, but these guys are looking at things that regulate glandular excretions…”   
“Eugh! No more!” Aya covered his ears.   
Yuuji frowned at him sternly.  “As I was saying, and we know that ‘talent’ has something to do with the gland controls in the brain.”   
“Really, I thought all your talent had to do with the ones down here,” Aya groped himself for emphasis.    
“Behave,” Yuuji warned.  “Or I will break all of your fingers one by one, and make you like it.”   
“Careful, you might get hurt,” Aya warned.     
“I didn’t mean it!” Yuuji said to the ceiling. And what ever kami was watching over the brat.  “They are connected with some of the top military intelligence communities, including our old pal, MOSSAD, and with the boner they’ve had for us since the war, it makes sense they would try to make an example of us now.”   
Aya looked beautifully blank.   
“Esset means the SS, you drop out,” Yuuji droned.  “They are dedicated to wiping us out the same way they did the Canaanites and whoever else their god told them to genocide.  If they can’t have all the money and land in the world, they want the rest of us all dead or enslaved, read the book.”   
“Oh,” Aya picked up another shirt from the laundry basket to fold. “Anti-Semite.  Isn’t that sort of old fashioned political thinking, wiping out someone just because?”   
“Exactly,” Yuuji said.     
“No, I mean…forget what I mean.  I keep forgetting you’re the evil enemy of all  mankind.”   
“You see?  No one wants to hear our side of the story.  After all, we lost,”  Yuuji swung his legs off the bed and sat up.  “Look at it this way.  What if the Americans were all still dedicated to wiping out every last Japanese person on earth, just because of the Pacific War?”   
“Oh, then they would be dead,” Aya asserted and plunked his shirt on the pile.  “Japan will not lose again.  No more little yellow monkey-men in kimonos.”   
“There, you see?” Yuuji stood up.  “It’s absurd, but there they are, butt hurt because their god made them special and the rest of the world has its doubts.  Just like a lot of other stupid religions I could name—but this Galea thing, it looks like our best bet.”     
Aya turned to look at him again.  “Are you being sarcastic or ironic?”   
“Obnoxiously pointing out the truth,” Yuuji said belligerently.  “Lets face it, game on.  It’s our team against theirs, and I think you’ve noticed by now, our team doesn’t handle loosing all that well.”     
“And I think some one’s got a boner for this Mosasaur or what ever,” Aya sighed and picked up a pair of socks to turn right side out and fold the cuffs over to keep them together.   
“That’s a prehistoric fish, you dimwit.  M-O-S-S-A-D, it’s an acronym for some Hebrew name, but they are not known for following international law and just about as dirty as Esset, except we have more class.  And dress better.”   
Aya slapped the socks down on the dresser beside the pile of t-shirts.  “You’re getting very cranky again, KUDOH.”   
Yuuji frowned.  “I am, aren’t I?”    
“Maybe you should go down to the shop and work with some arrangements?” Aya smiled at him slyly.  “Playing with the flowers will calm you down.”    
Yuuji caught him by the waist.  “I’d rather deflower you,” he purred and leaned over to nip Aya on the neck.   
Aya laughed.  “Stop that, you’ll leave marks.”   
Yuuji held him closer and continued to suck and nibble.     
Aya pounded on his chest to no avail.  “Stop it stop it stop it!”   
There was a tap at the door.  They both froze.     
Yuuji went to open it.  It was Yuki.     
“Chloe left the shop without telling anyone,” the serious little guy said.  “Miss Mihirogi wants us to track him down.  Someone’s killed Cedric Powell and she thinks he might have gone to Lady Grey’s.  But no one there is answering the phone.”   
“I thought we were under house arrest,” Yuuji said, leaning on the door frame.     
Yuki frowned.  “Free is still recovering from the attack on Kurumi-chan, and Ken vouched for you.”   
“Well,” Yuuji said.  “I guess that means we’ve been drafted.”   
   
   
   
   
   
 


	10. Ten

Chapter 10   
Yuuji rang the bell. Nothing. No one answered. He figured as much. Brad had said they would handle this end. So here they were, Ken, Yuki, Aya and himself, too many in his opinion for any mission, and since when was this a ‘mission’? Officially, it was a house call to see if their missing florist was playing hooky with his old girlfriend. And he said as much. “She’s probably just sobbing her heart on out his shoulder. You said they were old friends.”  
“Chloe’s been acting downbeat lately, since the announcement of the engagement,” Yuki said. “I think he cares more than a ‘friend’ would.”  
“Try again,” Ken said, stuffing his hands into the pocket of his varsity style jacket.   
Yuuji pressed the button again. Nothing.   
He pressed the button marked Concierge.   
The hard worn, stocky woman on duty demanded I.D., ready to listen with patent disbelief to their story. Yuuji lowered his sun glasses and purred his explanation, the disbelief fading as her eyes took in the color of his exotically shaped hazel green eyes, mop of sun faded golden hair and tawny skin. If Schuldig had been there, he would have informed Yuuji she was thinking he was like some gorgeous leonine alien, and that voice…  
She blinked, realizing he was awaiting an answer. “I suppose there is some reason to be concerned. What a terrible situation,” she stepped aside and let them in, then lead them to the elevator and to Lady Grey’s door. She knocked on the door, then called out Christine’s name. Then she took out the master key. Her hand was shaking a bit.   
Yuuji took her hand gently, sliding the key from her and putting it in the lock. “Wait out here, just in case.”   
She swallowed and nodded.   
Yuuji took two steps in, then held out his arm to bar the others. He looked over his shoulder. “Ken, call the police,” he said flatly.  
“Oh my god!” The concierge promptly fainted.   
Ken, being Ken, was the one who caught her, staggering a little under the heavier Caucasian weight. Yuki took out his phone to call the police.   
Aya peeked over Yuuji’s shoulder.   
“No,” Yuuji said. “Let the police handle this. We were just concerned for our friend, who was concerned for his friend.”  
“Are you sure they`re dead?”  
“Well this guy is. Not everyone has to be hacked to pieces to be dead.”  
Aya smacked him on the shoulder with a sullen pout.   
“Shouldn’t we look for Chloe?” Yuki asked, peeking around Aya and under Yuuji’s arm. The police had him on hold, the speaker on his phone announcing this over and over again.  
“Ken, try calling him again,” Yuuji said.   
Ken let the woman slide to the floor and sat her against the wall, then took out his phone to press the speed dial.   
In the apartment, a phone rang faintly.   
“He’s here, but if we go in, we mess up evidence,” Yuuji said.   
“Shouldn’t we…?” Yuki asked.   
Yuuji shook his head. “No, not this time. It’s perfectly innocent if we leave it alone. We wait for the police.” He turned to urge Aya and the younger boy back from the door way. Aya shot him a suspicious look, but he ignored it.   
The police eventually arrived to find Lady Grey and Edward staggering out of the bedroom holding their heads, and caught them in time to prevent them tracking into the blood.   
“They knocked us out,” Edward said, and that was all he had for the police. Someone had been there, and knocked them out and the next thing they knew, his phone was ringing and he and Christine were in the bedroom closet. He hadn’t seen the three dead and disfigured men laying about the flat before stumbling out of the bedroom. Christine was silent on what had happened before Edward arrived. The weapons, the gunshot wounds, no guns in the flat, it was all quite a mess.   
The concierge, having recovered from her faint, attested to the four arriving before the door was unlocked. She had heard no gun shots, nor anything else suspicious. “I don’t go spying on the tenants like some,” she stated in aggressive denial.   
In the end the police were forced to let everyone go while the lab crew marched in.   
Edward offered to take Christine for tea and she blanched. “No, no tea. Perhaps a glass of white wine somewhere quiet,” she said softly. The smell of blood was making her ill, but she had to think about what she had been told. They had been there to save her life.   
Oddly, her cell phone was on her desk next to her handbag.   
* * *   
Sylvia Linn levitated herself high enough over the wall to avoid the motion sensors, and set foot to ground again in the school Chancellor’s private garden. Taking out a small set of tools, she had the old fashioned French windows open in slightly less than a minute.   
“Can I help you?” a polite female voice asked as Sylvia slipped across the office floor in the moonlight, startling her out of her wits.   
Her plan had been to find the reports of what Crawford and Sarazawa had been up to. A decision made easier now that everything was centralized on the Rosencruz campus. She turned around, ready to defend herself. There was no one in the room. The clock ticked away on the wall, the air ducts had that bizarre, faint sense of breathing caused by air movement in an old building, but that was it. A telepath? “Who’s there?” she demanded.   
“Traugott; Herr Holzweber’s chief administrative assistant,” the voice said. “And you are Agent Sylvia Linn, Level B telekenetic, formerly assigned to Farblos under the late Colonel Amlisch. Explain why you are in the Chancellor’s office well after hours, and I might add, without an appointment?”  
The voice seemed to come from behind her this time. She turned around. A blond woman was now seated at the desk, prim in her staff uniform, smiling with a professionally polite chill, the light from a security lamp in the garden shining off the glasses she wore. Sylvia wondered if she shared an optometrist with Crawford. “Alright, you caught me. Now what?” she decided to brazen it out until she had a chance to escape or over power this woman.  
“I asked you what you were here for, Fraulein Linn,” Traugott said calmly. “Propelling yourself over the walls of this facility; fiddling the antiquated lock on the window to gain entrance—I must admit I was momentarily stunned at your boldness. So, here we are. Your explanation?”  
Sylvia frowned. There was something odd here. It was just 2:40 am, on a Wednesday morning. And here was this woman, an office worker, fully dressed, her hair immaculately braided about her head, sitting there in the darkened office as calm as if it were mid-work day, after appearing out of nowhere, unless she had been hidden under the desk. “Why is it I have never heard of you? You’re obviously a talent, and invisibility is a pretty good trick.”  
“I was just recently installed, and no, I am not one of the talents. Now answer my question. What is your purpose in breaking into this office? Your record shows you are a loyal member of the organization.” Her voice was mellifluous, her tone drifting between stern and professionally pleasant.  
“I’ve been waiting re-assignment for days now, since Agent Crawford saw fit to execute my team leader. I was hoping to find out what was going on.”  
“Then why not simply ask the Council?”  
“You’re new, you don’t know what it was like under the Three. The Council had a lot on their hands. They still do,” Sylvia responded. True enough. “I thought I would just get my file and see if there was anything in there worth finding out. Sneaking into records is sort of a tradition around here. That’s why Herr Chancellor refused to have them on the computer for so long.”  
“The last notation in your file states ‘awaiting re-assignment’, with out further elaboration,” the woman said mildly. “Is there anything else?”  
Sylvia tilted her head in curiosity. “Who recruited you? You said you weren’t talent.” It just occurred to her, that maybe this woman did not belong here. Something very weird was going on here.   
“Herr Crawford offered me the position,” Traugott said with that professional smile never leaving her face.   
Sylvia’s face blanked. “A field agent assigning Rosencruz staff?” She pulled out her gun and aimed it. “I think I’ll just call Security and find out which one of us has the least reason to be here at this time of night.”  
Traugott raised her eyebrows slightly in amusement. “With your career, and your ambitions, given the limbo you are currently in, is it wise to make assumptions based on so little? I think your emotions are getting in the way, Agent Linn. Perhaps you should take a few refresher classes,” she pressed a button on the old intercom system. “Security to the Chancellor’s office, we have an armed intruder.”  
“Hell no!” Sylvia shot at the woman. With the witness dead, she could duck out and…  
The woman did not fall over. Instead, she calmly stood and came around the desk, one hand resting lightly on it’s surface. “I’m sure you know the penalty for shooting school staff, Fraulein.” A spent bullet rattled across the desk as she lifted her hand slightly. “You’ve been under a considerable amount of stress for some time, haven’t you? I’m going to recommend medical absence. I know just the Doctor to help you.” She smiled, and Sylvia felt a cold chill go up her spine.   
She thought about making for the open windows. Shifting, she found her feet were caught. She looked down. The wooden boards had sprouted tendrils and tangled around her ankles, tightening as she started to struggle.  
* * *  
“Whoah,” Schuldig was looking at his phone. The stupid thing had pinged with messages while they were—otherwise occupied.   
It was such an off-beat reaction from the red headed terror, Crawford turned from getting dressed to look at him curiously.  
“Did you ‘see’ this?” Schuldig looked at him, eyes wide with alarm.   
“Obviously not,” Brad walked over to his side of the bed and took the phone from him to read the email. “And that explains why. That thing has a vicious sense of humor.”  
“Why us?” the red head pulled up the sheet to cover his chill prickled skin and whined. “Why do we have to do it?”  
“Why are you complaining? You wanted to go back to Japan,” Brad tossed the phone down on the very messed up bed and caught him by the chin to bend down and kiss him.   
“But…it’s Sylvia. That’s so not fair. Why can’t someone else take her?” Schuldig pouted.  
“I thought you had cleared up that issue,” Brad said, eyes narrowing at his erstwhile plaything.   
“You’re doing it again,” Schuldig complained with some difficulty as the fingers tightened on his jaw.   
“Yes. I am,” Brad stated.  
“I just don’t want to have to be the one to deal with this,” he managed. “You’re bound to want her shot, or have me make her brain exploded in her head and I—what exactly do you have against her anyway? So you slept with her once…”  
“Under orders,” Brad growled. “Not for the repulsive physical action of it.”   
“Still, it’s not a nice way to treat the first girl you ever had,” Schuldig could not pout again, as his face was already squashed into a rather fishy position. “May I have my face back before you break something?”  
Brad let him go, but the sense of impending doom did not let up with his jaw being free. Brad was mad, Schuldig noted. Very mad. Locked down tighter than a steel safe mad. He was either going to get beaten senseless, or shot. Mostly senseless, he figured, or Brad would not be quite so mad. He never got that mad at someone he was going to just shoot. Ouch, he thought, his insides threatening to melt.   
“Being told to prove I was capable of having sex with a woman is not my idea of a fond memory,” Brad hissed.   
Schuldig stood up, rubbing the circulation back into his face. “At least she is—was—um attractive? I mean, you did not get told to stick it into some utter pig, no?”  
“This is how you make things better?” Brad asked in that very quiet, controlled voice that meant the apocalypse was nigh.   
Schuldig pulled both lips into his mouth, looking contrite, then released the top and bit the bottom one before attempting to explain himself. “I will shut up,” he said, quite sensibly for once in his life.   
Unable to argue with this at all, Brad turned and stormed out of the bedroom, slamming the door.  
“Well, that went well,” Schuldig whispered to himself. “Nothing is broken, I can still walk, my head is not perforated even a little…I’m alive.” He fell back on the bed to stop the dizzy spell he was suddenly having.   
* * *  
Yuuji tossed his jacket over a chair in the shop work room. “Why are we still here?” he growled.  
Aya shrugged. “Where else do we have to go?” he shifted his eyes toward the storage room.   
Ken came out lugging a box of decorative ribbon spikes on top of a box of cheap glass vases. “You haven’t given up on finding your sister, have you, Aya?” he sounded surprised. He set the boxes down on a chair.   
“We’re pretty sure Esset has her,” Yuuji said grimly.   
Aya’s eyes widened a little at him, then he focused back on his floral arrangement work.   
Ken looked at Aya sympathetically. “You still have no idea of why they abducted you and Yohji?”  
Yuuji walked over to put an arm loosely across Ken’s shoulders. “What ever they were up to, they grabbed us when we went to see what happened to his sister,” he gave Ken a shove toward the other doorway, the one leading back into the main building, and made a face at him. “That’s why we’re sure they took her in the first place.”  
Ken got the hint and moved.  
“I need coffee,” Yuuji told Aya’s back. “You want any tea?”  
“No,” Aya said quietly.   
Yuuji gave Ken another shove, sharply, letting him know he was in the doghouse.   
In the kitchen, Ken turned, worried. “Look, I’m sorry but he’s got to face it sooner or later, that his sister—they’ve probably killed her by now.”   
“I don’t think he needs you rubbing his face in it, Ken,” Yuuji said firmly. “What ever Esset is up to, it’s not our problem any more; unless they come after us again.”  
“Who do you think killed those freaky guys in Lady Grey’s apartment?” Ken asked, sitting down at the table and crossing his arms on it while ‘Yohji’ washed out the coffee carafe no one had bothered to clean that morning.  
“Bullet wounds on the one I saw looked like someone meant him to bleed out slow; and judging from the puddle, that’s what he did,” Yuuji said mildly. “If this is all really about the drugs Powell was working on, Esset might have put paid to it, killing Powell and the other people who survived the process. That leaves Free—and the girl, doesn’t it? KB has been cleaning up Powell’s messes for months now, right?”  
“Yeah, but—how did you find out about that?” Ken asked, looking up at him.  
Yuuji smiled. (I’ve been slipping a lot on this assignment.) “Yuki told me.”  
“Kurumi-chan’s not one of Powell’s experiments,” Ken said. “Anyway, she’s going to be going back to Japan soon. The embassy is working on her papers, along with Kiki-chan’s.”  
Yuuji felt a tightness across his chest as the urge to light a cigarette hit him again. “I’m surprised KB doesn’t want to recruit them.”  
Ken frowned slightly. “Look, I don’t like the whole recruiting thing either, but where else have some of these kid’s got to go? Yuki’s been through hell, what we pulled him out of in New York shouldn’t have happened to any of those kids. He doesn’t trust himself not to freak out. Those girls are no where near what the other’s have been through. They can go home and forget about it.”  
“And the little guy with the gender issues?” Yuuji asked archly. “What about a psychiatrist instead of a gun? All I’m saying is we should be working to defuse these kids, not arm them for a later explosion. And do me a favor, don’t talk to Aya about his sister any more. It’s all I can do to keep him from blaming himself for everything and falling on his sword. At least I owe those creeps that; they took the thing away from him.”   
Ken was silent while Yuuji got his cup of coffee. Yuuji sat down across from him, resting one long leg across one of the other chairs and slouching down in his seat. He sipped his coffee and regarded Ken, wondering what he was processing in that sports and teamwork obsessed mind of his.   
Ken finally looked up at him. “Aya’s right. Where else do we have to go? KB, Kritiker, they all have our identities. They could fry us. We’re in this for life.”  
Yuuji snorted quietly. “And how many have quit KB and Kritiker? Quite a few we know about have gone rogue, but what about the quiet ones who just stepped out for a moment and didn’t come back when Esset swept through Tokyo and took out three quarters of Kritiker. People who know exactly how to get new identities and passports,” he sipped his coffee. “Boton, I can think of, for one. After all he worked undercover on the drug squad.”  
Ken got up and hesitated, a hand on the back of the chair he had been sitting in. “You can’t just walk away from this, knowing how much evil there is in the world, Yohji.”  
“I don’t know, Ken, maybe it’s time to give up the world,” he was feeling quarrelsome without the nicotine and booze. “Become a monk or something. For that matter, why haven’t you stepped down? Join a monastery, become a priest and stop killing people? Doesn’t your god forgive everything? I know some of the most peaceful Buddhists have been there, done that. Just let it go and stopped fucking up their karma.”   
Ken sighed. “I never know when you’re bullshitting or being serious. But you’re the last person to discus religion,” he smiled ruefully.   
“Oh, I think I’ve seen the light,” Yuuji said sincerely, holding up one hand, palm out. “From now on, I’m going to the shrine every New Year’s Day, crack of dawn.”  
Ken rolled his eyes then walked out of the kitchen.  
“I just don’t think the gods take us poor mortals all that seriously,” Yuuji set his coffee down and stretched his arms over his head to loosen his shoulders.   
Aya came in and sat down, looking at him. “You’re jazzing for a cigarette again, I can see it in your face. It makes you look ten years older.”  
“Thanks for the compliment,” Yuuji drawled, rubbing his cheek wearily.   
“Can I kill Ken?”  
Yuuji smiled briefly. “You’re not serious,” he picked up his cup again and sipped his coffee.   
Aya slouched back in his own chair. “You never take me seriously, do you?”  
“Mmm, no, but then I never take anyone serious, unless I’m going to kill them. You’re just too adorable to take seriously anyway. It’s part of your charm. You’re all shy and evasive and then boom, off goes the volcano.”  
Aya glared at him.  
“I’ve got everything we could possibly use from this place,” Yuuji said. “We need to get the hell out of here. It’s too much like Weiss. I feel like I’m stuck in a nightmare I can’t wake up from. Any minute now, Omi is going to come bouncing through that door.”  
“No, he’s not,” Aya put his foot up on the chair next to Yuuji’s. “What about the Shinjou girl?”  
“I don’t think she’s worth anything. With the interleukin drug scuttled, her side of it is useless. Her adoptive parents are dead, the formula is gone, the people behind Grancoster-Wells are gone, she’s a dead end, and lucky to be alive,” he sighed, and found his fingers reaching for an ashtray that wasn’t there to pick up a cigarette that wasn’t there. Damn it!

  


 


	11. Eleven

  
Nagi walked along the sidewalk, his hands in his jeans pockets, casually strolling like any other young wastrel with nothing better to do. Head down, taking a kick at an occasional piece of flotsam, he had followed Tot and the Shinjou girl to two shops, and waited outside while they chattered. As they came out of the second one, Tot glanced at him from inside the glass door, and he moved to go into the store, brushing against her as she came out. He felt her soft hand slide something into his as she pointed something out to Shinjou across the street. He grasped the little package and continued on inside, slipping it into his slacks pocket.  
He wondered around the store for a few minutes, found and bought a candy bar he liked, and headed back to the hotel. He tossed the wrapper from the candy bar in a trash can he passed, and checked out the small bindle in his pocket. From the feel of it, it was a flash drive. He didn’t want to take it out under the eyes of London’s thousands of cameras, just in case.  
He pushed open the door of the hotel and walked across the lobby, heading not for the bank of elevators, where people waited to get on, but the stairs. He didn’t like being in elevators with strangers in this country. Almost every one of them had CCTV, and if he had to defend himself from another passenger, it would be on screen somewhere. There would be weirdness no matter how passive he appeared. Plus, he needed the exercise. As he was so often being told, he sat too long at the computer. Well, DUH!  
Finally reaching their floor, he walked across the hallway and slid his card through the reader, then opened the door, bracing himself for some new horror guaranteed to keep him a virgin for the rest of his life.  
Nope, Brad was sitting there, fully dressed on the sofa, watching the news, the remote in his hand clicking every few seconds as he skimmed faster than the reporter could read. From the sound of water running, Schuldig was in the shower.  
Brad turned the TV off and chucked the remote aside (to be lost in the cushions as usual), and stood up.  
“It’s a flash drive,” Nagi took the packet out and held it out to him.  
Brad accepted it and pried it from the Hello Kitty note paper Tot had mummified it in. Holding the little black plastic stick, his eyes went distant and turned that weird amber-gold color as the capillaries in his irises expanded.  
Nagi felt a funny, fluttering little lift in his heart as he realized this might mean Tot would be allowed to return to base. Then his inner critic called him a dork for putting it that way. What he really meant was to have her back near him again, with her silly hair and perfume and well, he would need the shower when Schuldig was done if he didn’t stop this nonsense. He cleared his throat and straitened his jacket, brushing off some imaginary what ever that might have gotten on it. Damn it, his body hated him or something.  
Brad returned from la-la-land and handed him the flash drive. “Sort this into reports. And delete anything concerning us from all their files. The airport security tapes have served their purpose. Schuldig!” he bellowed the last word over his shoulder.  
The bathroom door was snatched open. “Must you yell at me?” he demanded, standing there with a towel across his shoulders and nothing else. “I can hear you before you open your mouth, you know. And no one is looking at your dick, Nagi, so stop stressing.”  
Nagi’s face turned bright red.  
Brad had a critical look at the affected area Nagi. “You are growing up, aren’t you? Don’t worry, the every-little-thought thing usually stops by the time you’re 20.”  
“That’s what he thinks,” Schuldig muttered.  
Nagi segued into a strange purple. “No one asked either of you!” he snapped and went to do his job.  
“Oh, for—that’s the last time I try to mentor you!” Brad complained in exasperation.  
“Not listening to you!” Nagi retorted from sitting down at the small writing desk his laptop was on.  
“Seriously, Brad, what the hell do you want? Not that you’d notice, but I have to do my hair,” Schuldig indicated his wet, straggling locks.  
Brad shot him an annoyed look. “Go tell Sarazawa they’re to extract the Shinjou girl along with Tot. And not to make a mess of it. No bombs.”  
“I take it no dismemberments or decapitations, either,” Schuldig said sarcastically, and wrapped the towel around his hips. “Well I’m not walking around this rotten city with wet hair, nor am I going to do a kamikaze blow dry and split all my ends. You can just wait.” With that, he turned back into the bathroom and shut the door behind him.  
Nagi smirked to himself as Brad fell back on the sofa to hold on tight to his head, closed his eyes, and sighed heavily. The never ending drama that was Brad and Schuldig. He plugged in the flash drive and waited for the file checker to let it open.  
Holy crap! Sarazawa had hit the mother load. Not only had he skimmed off all of Krypton Brand’s mission files, he had pulled everything Interpol had on Esset, and Weiss up to date. He checked the one on Weiss. Interpol had flagged Weiss as now potentially rogue from its original intent.  
That one, he copied off and sent to Tsukiyono’s private email from an anonymous encrypted email bounced through fifteen different nodes world wide, just to make him paranoid. His evil deed done for the day, Nagi got down to work. After reading the Interleukin file, he wondered why exactly Brad wanted to grab Shinjou Kurumi.  
* * *  
Thirty minutes later, a splendiferously fluffy Schuldig tied back his coppery mop with a rainbow tie dyed bandana, checked his bad self in the ornamental mirror over the little table by the suite’s door, and made sure his key card was in his jacket pocket. “Am I supposed to hang around and help out, or just give them the message?”  
“Help at a distance,” Brad said, not looking away from the TV.  
“Look at me,” Schuldig stated, sounding irritated.  
Brad looked, his expression bland.  
“Oh, for—I should know better than to expect anything from you,” the redhead grouched.  
“I wish you’d stop wearing those stupid scarves,” Brad said judiciously.  
“Bandanas, Brad. Men wear bandanas. Women wear scarves.”  
“But you wear them like a woman,” Brad admonished gently.  
“It’s the bandana or the hat, Brad,” Schuldig warned.  
Brad rolled his eyes and went back to watching the news.  
Schuldig left him to it, smacking the door shut behind himself.  
@ @ @  
Schuldig found a nicely convenient and mostly empty pub across the street, ordered an imported beer rather than the local mud, and sat down to give the impression of doing some serious brooding. He filtered out all the other minds and located the two he needed.  
Both Fujimiya and Sarazawa were getting stir crazy over this assignment, which gave him a bit of a sadistic smirk. Served them right for having been Weiss in the first place.  
He slithered into Sarazawa’s mind, establishing the connection. /My goodness, what a lot of murder you have in mind! And there I was wondering how you and Brad ever got along./  
/What now, Schuldig?/ Yuuji thought at him grimly. He was pulling faded blooms from the loose flower racks. Yuki would toss them into the dehydrator for potpourri mix, not a bad idea to economize, but the whole thing was so depressing. In fact everything was depressing, and he needed a cigarette in the worst way, damn it!  
Now Schuldig was worried. The brain washing was putting a real dent in Sarazawa’s happy-go-lucky persona. Flashes of Kudoh came and went, threatening to take over, leaving him momentarily confused, and worse, prone to violence that would kill their cover. Schuldig switched from Japanese to German, the better to force matters back into perspective. /Good news, you’re to get out of there. And bring the Shinjou girl with you. No fuss, no muss and NO bombs./  
/Awe, but Aya wants to kill Ken./ Yuuji complained sarcastically.  
/Tell your little bum-boy to behave, jah? We need to get out of here nice and quiet. Brad’s been holding something back, and when he does that…./  
/We’re skirting a whirlpool of trouble./ Yuuji finished for him. /I’m well aware of his bad habits, thank you. Can you manage Tot? Or do I have to do this manually./  
/I’ll give her her instructions; you just get yourself and Fujimiya out of there. And remember, Sarazawa Yuuji, to drop the false persona when you walk out the door./  
The blond’s response was not worded but a mental wave of agreement as he beheaded his last wilting rose.  
Schuldig focused on finding Tot. After Sarazawa’s murderous malaise, Tot was a roller coaster of random; plinking off bumpers of scientific query, irritation with Ken, curiosity about Yuki (must not mention that to Nagi, oh hell no no no) and bright sparkly things. He remembered to brace himself this time. /Totto-chan, time for the next part of your assignment./  
The blast of audio feed back like squeal of joy made his eyes cross in pain, a plethora of images and jumbled crazy thinking hit him like a brick upside the head. He slouched back in the booth seat, glad he had thought to find a place to sit down.  
/Shuu-chan! We can go home now?/  
/We have to pick up an agent at Rosencruz and then go home, yes,/ his aching head! He grabbed the beer and downed it, hoping a swift buzz would help relieve the pain. /Take the Shinjou girl for a walk, I will join you both and we will go back to the hotel. She will need her handbag with her ID./  
/Hai, hai! I’ll tell her the consulate called with our new passports./  
Schuldig smiled grimly. /Then you will need a phone call. Give me 20 minutes and I will call the shop and ask for Shinjou-san./  
/Hai, hai!/ and with that, she hung up on him. Literally mentally hung up on him with a sparkly pink Hello Kitty phone.  
He blinked. What a lunatic. A damned good thing he had had practice with Farfarello. He left off her planning what she would pack in a small tote bag, and reported back to Sarazawa. /I will call in less than 20 minutes pretending to be the Japanese consulate. Do not offer to escort the girls. We want the extraction to go un-noticed as long as possible. Nagi has to have time to wipe the files./  
/We’re still under house arrest, how the hell are we supposed to just walk out the front door?/ Yuuji complained. He was sucking the pain from a thorn prick on his thumb. One more reason he had learned to hate flowers.  
/Telepath, remember? Don’t worry, everyone will be distracted,/ his mirth hit Yuuji’s mind like a glimmer of sunshine through clouds. /They will think you and Fujimiya are going at it in the bed room. No one wants to deal with that./  
Yuuji chuckled to himself. /If I had any shame, I would be blushing. Fortunately, we won’t be here to deal with it. Just don’t tell Aya what you’re up to./  
@ @ @  
“This isn’t the consulate,” Shinjou Kurimi said as Tot, who was walking with her arm linked in hers, halted in front of the hotel.  
Tot smiled at her sweetly. “Change of plans, Kurumi-chan. But don’t worry, we are still going back to Japan.”  
Schuldig caught Kurumi up by the other arm, “Relax, we are friends,” he said, his smooth growl of a voice in her ear in accented Japanese. “Laugh, Totto-chan, we are having fun, no?”  
Tot giggled and her bright smile made Kurumi wonder what the hell she had gotten into now. “Don’t worry, this is Tot’s family now. Those scary KB people were never going to let you go. Did you want to stay here in London forever?”  
Kurumi frowned, but at this point, she couldn’t seem to even think about escaping. Her feet were going along as if by themselves.  
Schuldig let go of her arm to press the button on the elevator. When it opened, Nagi was standing in there. He smiled shyly at Tot and tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes. She squealed and dove at him for a hug, spinning him around and nearly knocking them both over.  
“Settle down, you two,” Schuldig hustled Kurumi into the elevator and leaned in to stop the doors closing. “Take over here, Nagi, I have to go back and cover for the other two. Shinjou-san, Naoe-san, our resident genius,” he said the last word mockingly.  
“We can eat cake!” Tot exclaimed clapping her hands together. “Crawford-sama said we could have the full cream tea when this was over. Have you had the full cream tea?” she asked Shinjou, eyes wide with childish delight.  
“Um…” Shinjou blinked again.  
Schuldig pressed the floor button and ducked out as the doors slid closed, relieved to be free of that insanity.  
Nagi looked at the girl curiously. She looked normal and healthy enough for someone who had been poisoned all her life. What was Brad up to? “We’ll have to order in,” he told Tot. “Shinjou-san, you’ll just have to trust us.”  
Otherwise, Brad was going to get the duct tape out.  
@ @ @  
Yuuji caught Aya by the wrist and pulled him away from the ikebana arrangement he was in the middle of. “Time for a break,” he purred in his ear, his breath stirring the silly lock of hair Aya insisted on leaving long, sending a wave of delicious heat through his partner’s body  
Purple eyes met green, a brow arched.  
Yuuji smiled meaningfully.  
Aya stripped off the cotton gloves he was wearing and dropped them on the work table top.  
But he was brought up short when instead of leading him upstairs, Yuuji lead him to the back door. “Where are we going?”  
Yuuji put a finger to his lips. “Schuldig is covering for us, but we have to move fast. Out.”  
Aya sulked, but moved past him out the door.  
They ducked up the alleyway and through to the next main street. Fortunately the hotel Brad had chosen for their temporary base was not that far a walk away. If only KB had had a clue.  
@ @ @  
“It hasn’t been a total bust of a mission,” Sarazawa sipped his coffee. Tot still insisted on it being served in a fancy tea cup, but at least he could have a hot cup of coffee instead of tea. Funtome Ceylon Select with the cute little bunny with the eye patch and a suit on the box or not, he wasn’t having it. Tot could sulk all she liked.  
Brad was stalking the carpet, in a tearing rage. Nothing had lead to the solution to the problem he had chased this damned goose for. The only thing that kept him from venting his anger verbally was the presence of their ‘guest’ and Schuldig’s tendency to mock him with an enthusiastic “Jah, mein Fuhrur!” at every turn, for which some day, when he was no longer useful, his neck would be wrung.  
Schuldig snorted derisively and sipped his tea with his pinky in the air as instructed. /Don’t get angry at me, this is not my fault. We all thought we had a lead, and Sarazawa is correct, we have lots of information that will make the Council ecstatic. The location of every Kritiker agent in Europe is nothing to sneeze at, mein Fuhrur./  
/Knock it off, DEITER./ Brad snarled at him mentally.  
Schuldig broiled at him with evil intent.  
“Aya-kun, have some more cake!” Tot insisted.  
Aya shuddered his decline, “Too sweet.”  
Shinjou was thinking they were all mad; but for now, nothing said ‘okay’ like elaborate cream filled puff pastry crowns. That, and the fact that everyone spoke fluent Tokyo dialect Japanese had made her drop some of her nervousness. The mix of English at the flower shop had caused her some stress at times, despite their assurances that she was in no danger from them.  
Tot had changed into one of her Lolly outfits; a ruffled concoction of lace with printed puppies in baskets around the hem. She’d tied her still dyed black hair up in bunches over ponytails, and put on her normal make up. Transformed into a big living doll, she seemed perfectly harmless, and her childish tea party chatter was working to calm Shinjou even further. (While making Brad want to strangle her, but you can’t have everything go your way all the time.)  
Nagi was trying to work at the same time and be part of the tea extravaganza, but his laptop had come into danger more than once. He wasn’t all that fond of cake, even less so after the past months, but the little pastel cookies with delicately flavored cream fillings were not so bad. “So now we go after this Galea organization.”  
“No, now we escort Sylvia Linn to Shinjuku,” Brad stated. And with that he looked at Shinjou Kurumi. “There is a doctor there,” he smiled slightly, and she felt a strange chill go up her back, “to whom you would be most useful.”  
‘Uh-oh,’ Nagi thought.  
“But—Shinjuku—sank into the ground….” Kurumi said. She had heard the news, seen the pictures and vids on the TV…  
“Dr. Mephisto!” Tot exclaimed, clasping her arm. “Kurumi-chan, your blood could cure lots of people! And we can see Doll and Aya-chan again!”  
“No,” Brad said, “This is business. Shinjou-san, Shinjuku is there, people survived, but the labs in the area were hit hard and something happened. Your parent’s work with DNA could help put a stop to the genetic mutagens attacking people in Shinjuku since the event. Dr. Mephisto can only help one person at a time. Your blood could lead to a an inoculation. Are you willing to volunteer?”  
Kurumi was broadsided. She sat there, tea cup in her hand, a mouthful of cookie. After a moment, she finished chewing and swallowed, then had a sip of her tea to clear her throat. It gave her time to think. To think about what her adopted parents had said before they were executed. As much as she wanted to run away and hide, all their work, all their kindness, their sacrifice in the end….She blinked back tears. “Yes,” she said softly. She wanted to do something meaningful with her life. This could be it.  
Tot gave her arm a little squeeze, then smiled kindly at her. Not the current crazy girl smile, but the kind ‘Kiki’ smile she had been accustomed to. “You’re very brave, Kurumi-chan,” she said in a normal sounding voice.  
Nagi finally let the tension go out of his shoulders regarding this. That meant he would only be responsible for controlling one prisoner. And that one a major talent. Damn.  
/Brad, what’s in this deal for us?/ Schuldig asked. He would follow the man to hell, but Shinjuku…maybe not so much. In fact, he had vacation time coming….  
/We’ll see,/ Brad responded. /I’m going on intuition here. A trade, the girl for information, any information, that will lead to the medical research behind that implant./  
Schuldig helped himself to another fairy cake and considered Outer Mongolia.

 

Note: I am pretty much aware that I did not do my best work on this arc of the story.  Not only that but I messed up on chapter numbers!  But things have changed and I promise the next arc will be back up to standard. Thank you for your patience.  ^_^


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